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RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES 



.ORGE D.HERRON 



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LIBRAR Y (F C ONGRESS. 

Chap.j!^^Z^opYri No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



SOCIAL MEANINGS 



OF 



RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES. 



Books by Prof. George D. Herron,D.D. 

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From the Loridon Christian World, 
" We have heard a great deal about Christian Social- 
ism, but never in our day have we had the moral founda- 
tions and spiritual law of a Christian society preached 
with such prophetic fervor and power as in the little 
volume introduced to English readers by Rev. Charles 
A. Berry. The author, Prof. George D. Herron, holds 
in Iowa College a chair, the very name of which is sug- 
gestive of a new departure in religious teaching. It is 
that of "Applied Christianity.* " 



Social Meanings 



OF 



Religious Experiences 



BY ^ 

GEORGE D HERRON 



A course of lecture-sermons prepared for the Settlement School 
of Social Economics^ held by Prof. Grahaiii Taylor^ D.D., at Chicago 
Commons, August 22-29, ^^95 ; afterward given in the Shawmut 
Congregational Churchy Boston, 



iJUM 1 1888' 



^y^^f^-^^mf^A 



New York: 46 East Fourteenth Street 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 

Boston : 100 Purchase Street 



A 



^ 






Copyright, 1896, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. 



C. J. PETERS & son, typographers. 



2C0 ti^e iWetnorg 

OF 

The Rev. John P. Coyle, D.D. 



CONTENTS. 



I. The Affections as Social Energies 

II. Economics and Religion .... 

III. The Leadership of Social Faith . 

IV. Repentance unto Service . . . 
V, Material World and Social Spirit 

VI. The Appeal of Redemption to Progress 



PAGE 
II 

49 

87 

127 

165 
199 



I. 

THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 

Gen. XXII. i, 2. 



Picture a household in which the mysteries of life are made plain, and 
its commonplaces transfigured in the light which is shed from those four 
poems in Luke's Gospel. Given the home of a Jewish carpenter, poor but 
not pinched, in sunny, flowery, free Galilee, with its synagogues, its Sab- 
bath, its Scriptures, its annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, its saturation to 
the point of precipitation with the ideas and sentiments which these insti- 
tutions have been fostering for centuries. Give this family as its prime 
consciousness, no matter how come by, a conviction, perhaps not rare 
among pious households in that day, that it had in its bosom Him who was 
to fulfil the expectation of Israel; and let this conviction find its specific 
modes of conception in the shape of this maternal song now ascribed to 
Mary, this paternal song ascribed to Zacharias, this heart-song of the 
shepherds ascribed to the angels, and the sage words ascribed to the aged 
Simeon. Let the daily life be lived, the weekly Sabbath spent, the Scrip- 
tures repeated, the visits to Jerusalem made, and all these things find their 
interpretation, at least to the heart of yearning and brooding motherhood, 
in the terms of such poems as these, and what an atmosphere must have 
been generated in that home! The very presence of the Hebrew spirit, 
in its most religious and sacredest manifestation, as " the spirit of the 
holy gods," of the Holy One of Israel, the Holy Spirit, must have reigned 
in that home, nurturing the messianic character, and preparing a basis for 
the messianic consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth. — John P. Coyle, in 
*'The Spirit in Literature and Life." 

The wings of the soul lose their plumes ; the leaves of the flower fast 
fall off and wither ; and of this fountain of love there remain but a few 
drops. We still call these few drops love ; but it is no longer the clear, 
fresh, all-abounding child-love. It is love with anxiety and trouble, a con- 
suming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like raindrops 
upon the hot sand ; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice ; love which 
says, "Wilt thou be mine?" not love which says, "I must be thine." It 
is a most selfish, vacillating love. And this is the love which poets sing, 
and in which young men and maidens believe ; a fire which burns up and 
down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes. 
— Max Mullery in " Memories." 

10 



SOCIAL MEANINGS OF RELIGIOUS 
EXPERIENCES. 



I. 

THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL 
ENERGIES. 

And it came to pass after these things, that God did prove 
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham; and he said, Here am I. 
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, 
even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah ; and offer him 
there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will 
tell thee. — Gen. xxii. i, 2. 

In the literature of national and religious 
beginnings, the most interesting and effective 
figure is that of Abraham. Whatever the 
scholars may decide as to dates and facts, we 
are sure that we have a true outline of the 
patriarch's life. The story is so artlessly beau- 
tiful, so divinely without design, that its les- 
sons win and delight the moral reason. His 

II 



12 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

life does not belong to the heroic or Homeric 
type, but rather to the idyllic, which is greater. 
The character of Abraham is too simple and 
natural, too true and morally majestic, to form 
an epic. He was not a perfect man ; he 
sinned, sometimes, and blundered. But he 
looms above his times, which were full of 
both hideous decay and vast potency, as the 
best offering that humanity for long ages could 
make to God. 

Abraham does not seem to have been inter- 
ested in any particular form of religion, or to 
have cared at all for religion as such ; his 
interest was in human life and its relations. 
Over life's meaning and problems, its resources 
and destiny, he was always brooding. Being 
the man he was, he could do little else at 
such a time. An old and wonderful civiliza- 
tion, about the power and triumphs of which 
the records of books and bricks give us only 
hints, was passing away ; and Abraham felt 
himself both called and driven to begin some- 
where a new order of things. He was pur- 
sued by some sort of a social ideal, and 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 1 3 

dreamed of a holy national life. His call 
never allowed him to be satisfied with what 
he had done, or with himself ; he must always 
be seeking some better thing. Whenever he 
was overcome by suggestions to adjust his 
faiths and ideals to the seeming facts and 
forces of his life and environment, then the 
elements of moral tragedy and endless suffer- 
ing entered his career. We read lightly the 
story of the sending away of Hagar into the 
wilderness, if we do not see in Abraham a 
terrible and helpless sufferer. His was the 
matchless suffering of needing to make an- 
other suffer, and that other the mother of his 
own child, for that which was in no sense 
her sin, but which was the guilt of his own 
hesitancy and unbelief. Worse than that, the 
sin and sorrow both came through her whose 
bidding he had in weakness obeyed in order 
that he might have peace. So every attempt 
to trust the fulfilment of his soul's promises 
to what our scientific age would call the facts 
of his life, rather than to the divine risk of 
that moral adventure which will follow no star 



14 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

but its own ideal, resulted in tragedy and 
failure. 

But there were few such failures in Abra- 
ham's life. One trial of his faith nerved him 
for a greater. Each proof of his obedience 
strengthened him for another. He was a do- 
mestic man, loving his kinsmen and native 
country. But when, probably after years of 
increasing discontent with the existing Chal- 
dean conditions of society, he was moved by 
that mighty and concluding impulse to get 
away into a distant country he had never 
seen, and there found a new nation, Abra- 
ham obeyed and entered upon the divine ad- 
venture. This was one of those commanding 
impulses which the Hebrew so simply and 
accurately called the word of God ; which 
men have never been able to disobey without 
the loss of vision and spiritual reason, — the 
problems of life henceforth being figured out 
rather than seen through. God gave Abraham 
great possessions. But when a dispute arose 
between Lot's herdmen and Abraham's herd- 
men as to land and water rights, Abraham 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES, 1 5 

at once surrendered the fairest of his lands 
to one who had no just claim upon them. 
He was more sensitive to the social honor 
and peace than to his own rights; more anx- 
ious to keep the social faith, to preserve the 
brotherhood, than to keep his possessions. 
When his ungracious and selfish nephew was 
carried away captive by a marauding king, 
Abraham immediately gathered his friends, 
and marched to Lot's rescue. On the eve of 
Sodom's destruction we find him pleading with 
God for the salvation of his sinning neigh- 
bors. Perhaps without knowing it, Abraham 
treated his whole life as a social function, 
to be used of God for all sorts and conditions 
of men. His life is rich in ethical romance, 
his career full of social chivalry. He was so 
unfailingly the friend of man, that he came 
to be known among neighboring tribes and 
nations as the friend of God. So vital and 
familiar was his fellowship with God, so strong 
and faithful his search for what was good for 
man, that God delighted to be Abraham's 
guest, to come in and sup with him, and con- 



1 6 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

fide to him the future. Through all his long 
pastoral life, increasing in sweet moral dig- 
nity and social value with each new experi- 
ence, adversity and prosperity alike prepared 
him for whatever God might ask, and gave 
him a purer view of things to come. Like 
Isaiah and Socrates, with many of the good 
and wise men of the more anxious centuries 
that were to follow him, Abraham saw Christ's 
day and was glad; just as we may see the per- 
fected humanity and rejoice. When the call 
came to offer Isaac, Abraham was responsive 
to the call, long years of training in the school 
of obedience having prepared him to make 
this supreme sacrifice. 

There came a time, so the story reads, when 
God would make proof of Abraham. The 
command is so worded that it becomes a sort 
of moral vivisection : " Take now thy son, 
thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, 
and offer him for a burnt offering." This 
was the son whom God had given him as one 
from the dead, after years of praying and 
patient waiting, as the beginning of a new 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 1 7 

and better people, whose numbers were to be 
as the sands of the sea. There must be both 
an immediate and an eternal worth to the les- 
son which God would teach Abraham through 
the agony and surrender, the triumph and 
peace, of such an experience. For we must 
keep in mind it was really Abraham, not 
Isaac, who was to be sacrificed ; Abraham, 
not Isaac, who was to make the surrender of 
will, and the offering of life. We should also 
consider that it is not the soul unused to sor- 
row that feels a sorrow most keenly, as we 
are apt to think, but the soul that has been 
attuned to songs of grief by deep experience ; 
sorrow alone prepares the heart to apprehend 
sorrow in the reality and fruitfulness of its 
meaning. Abraham's previous experiences 
could only sharpen the anguish of this strong- 
est demand upon his faith. Yet Abraham 
walked trustfully to the altar upon which he 
was to offer his son to God. He did not 
seek to delay or evade strict obedience. He 
did not trifle with what he understood to be 
his duty; he juggled not with his conscience. 



1 8 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

He did not tell Sarah, in order that she 
might dissuade him from his sacrificial pil- 
grimage, as she doubtless would have tried 
to do. His preparatory struggle lasted but 
a single night, and then he prepared to 
act ; not with sullen resignation, but with 
trustful and triumphant obedience. Isaac was 
already slain in Abraham's heart before he 
left his tents at Beersheba for the land of 
Moriah. The writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews suggests that Abraham accounted 
God able to raise Isaac from the dead, if 
such should be necessary to the fulfilment of 
the divine promise that Isaac should be the 
firstborn of a new nation. But it is not 
likely that the patriarch had any such thought, 
even after Isaac had already been offered in his 
heart. There is no indication that Abraham 
expected Isaac's restoration, or the provision 
of some substitutional sacrifice. Abraham was 
not playing hide and seek with God. His 
sacrifice was real, offered in the great faith 
that the righteousness which he could not 
then define, and could but vaguely under- 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES, 1 9 

stand, would some time be made intelligible 
to his moral sense. 

The students of this event have already 
shown that the literal sacrifice and burning of 
Isaac's body need not have been a violation 
of Abraham's conscience. Human sacrifices 
were at that day the climacteric feature of 
the tribal and national religions. The chiefs 
and kings all about Abraham were accustomed 
to offer human beings as sacrifices to appease 
the wrath and gain the favor of their deities. 
From offering slaves and captives taken in 
war, they had come to offer their first-born 
sons — following the growth of the idea that 
the more valuable the sacrifice the better 
pleased was the deity. Of course Abraham 
could sacrifice as dearly to the God of all the 
earth as the chieftains and kings to their 
tribal deities, whatever the grief and cost, 
however long he must wait to know the right- 
eousness of the sacrifice. 

But God was able to enlarge Abraham's 
life, to light up both the retrospect and pros- 
pect of the Hebrew chieftain's career, without 



20 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

the taking of Isaac's body. I think it is Dean 
Stanley who states that the staying of Abra- 
ham's uplifted hand was forever afterward re- 
garded by the Hebrew people as a protest 
against human sacrifice. We know that among 
ancient peoples the Hebrews are distinguished 
for their sense of the sacredness of human life. 
Frederick Robertson, with all his holy earnest- 
ness, protests against the common treatment 
of the story as though Isaac were actually 
slain by his father upon the altar. Yet these 
miss the lesson of the sacrifice. The physical 
life or death of Isaac was quite an incidental 
matter, and should not so much exercise our 
religious concern. It was Abraham, not Isaac, 
who was being sacrificed ; Abraham's life, not 
Isaac's body, that God was after. God did not 
avert, but accomplished, the sacrifice by the 
staying of Abraham's hand. 

There was nothing arbitrary, even in the 
best possible sense in which that word may be 
used, in God's command to offer Isaac ; no 
mere testing of the moral stuff of Abraham's 
life. The sacrifice was not a divine deceit, but 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 21 

was virtually made ; not a trial and experiment, 
but a process and accomplishment ; not a see- 
ing if something could be done, but a doing of 
something. God does not do things because 
he can; nor does he try men to see what they 
are made of, as we often say. Trial is not 
fundamentally a probation, but an educative 
process, uniting man with his brothers and 
with God. It is not because God wants his 
own way that he leads us into the knowledge 
of his will along paths we walk with bleeding 
feet, through deeps of suffering, under billows 
of flame ; but because only through his way can 
human life become social, and hence eternal. 
God calls for no sacrifice from man that he 
himself does not make for man ; asks obedi- 
ence to no moral law which does not organize 
his own activity ; speaks nothing as truth for 
man that is not already truth in himself. The 
command to offer Isaac was given out of the 
fulness of God's faith in Abraham. It is an 
expression of both the delight and hope of God 
in our evolving and ascending human life ; an 
expression of the joy which every growing man 



22 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

is to the heart of God. When Abraham offered 
Isaac in the faith that God was not only power, 
but that he would prove himself a righteous 
power, God not only gave him back a new 
Isaac, but a purer and vaster faith. In the 
course of this experience, Abraham dimly saw 
the Lamb eternally slain in the heart of God ; 
that is, he saw, what the world yet scarcely 
dreams, that power is not merely righteous, 
but that power is love, and that righteousness 
is simply love realizing itself through sacrifice. 
Abraham came back from his adventure with a 
better future for the world on his hands, com- 
missioned anew to care for the world's funda- 
mental and final interests. The life of Israel, 
springing from Abraham, began with messianic 
impulses and a world movement stirring in its 
blood. On this parental tree grew the char- 
acters of Joseph, David, Elijah, Daniel, and the 
envisioned prophets. The character of Jesus 
is, in part, the fruitage of Abraham's faith. 
Jesus was the evolution of Hebrew national 
life and history, and without Abraham could 
not have been. 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 23 

We get little of the lesson of Abraham's 
sacrifice from the empty exegesis of mere 
criticism, which lacks the prophetic sense and 
moral imagination, the vivid insight and his- 
toric spirit, essential to true interpretation. 
We are ethically degraded by the inane piet- 
isms that are the staple of the religious com- 
mentaries ; the most commonly relished of 
these pious comments on Abraham's sacrifice 
are not only immoral in substance, but socially 
vicious in application. 

In general, the pietistic interpretations put 
God in the attitude of trying an experiment to 
see whether Abraham really loved him better 
than his son Isaac. Of course the idea always 
is, that Abraham was in danger of an idola- 
trous love for Isaac, and that he had to be 
shown this danger through the proposed sac- 
rifice in order that he might give God the 
greater love. But the God of Abraham and 
Isaac, of Jesus and Paul, of Mazzini and Lin- 
coln, is not the individualistic and unethical 
God he is pietistically conceived to be. God 
is not jealous of the love that unites human 



24 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

beings, but carries the cross in his heart to 
draw all men into eternal habitations of love. 
Love is the home of the normal man ; it is the 
Father's house, the natural social order, from 
which we have wandered prodigal, wasteful of 
life in our efforts to set up independent house- 
keepings. There was no balancing of quanti- 
ties of love, to weigh out just how much 
Abraham should give to God and how much 
to Isaac. God was not trying an experiment, 
or anxiously trying to get a man to love him 
more than his son, but was evolving a char- 
acter and commissioning a life. 

The danger was not that Abraham should 
love Isaac too much, but that he should love 
him too little. The vast peril before Abraham, 
and before the purpose of God, was that Abra- 
ham's love for his son should dwindle into a 
mere individual and hence suicidal delight, and 
that both father and son should fall from the 
social function of their lives. The time had 
come when God would clearly show Abraham 
the difference between making Isaac an indi- 
vidualistic joy and the founder of a family, and 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 2$ 

making his life a function in the development 
of a redemptive history. The whole story- 
turns about the sacrifice of Isaac in service, 
rather than in mere happiness or mere death. 
This was the meaning of Abraham's sacrifice 
of himself in the offering of his son Isaac ; 
this the new revelation that came to Abra- 
ham. These two men were sent upon a divine 
errand. Their consciousness was not of an in- 
dividual self to be gratified and delighted, but 
of a human organism of which they were vital 
and sustaining members. They saw a human 
history to be made, a human destiny to be 
wrought out, in which they were to be God's 
organs. God was teaching Abraham the les- 
son the world is slowly learning from Jesus 
and his cross, — the lesson that he that saveth 
his life shall lose it, while he that loseth his 
independent life to make it a function of the 
common life finds it eternally. When Abra- 
ham was so wrought upon that he would surely 
train his son to be an organ through which 
God should work out a universal good, so 
wrought upon that he could divinely risk his 



26 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

son as an offering to God upon the altar of 
human need, then God could indeed say that 
he had a trustworthy friend in the man who 
withheld not his only son. 

Speaking fundamentally, it is not science, 
but feeling, that makes for social evolution ; 
and the affections are the social energies 
which are working out the unity and harmony 
of human life. Hence, before all else, the 
individual affections must be socially conse- 
crated. The experiences of life are to teach 
us that love is social law, and not private prop- 
erty to be held for the gratification of one's 
self. Individual love is fulfilled only through 
becoming a social element. The individualiza- 
tion of love is a social disintegration, and is 
either the murder or suicide of love itself ; the 
socialization of love is its life and growth, and 
is the ground upon which we are promised im- 
mortality. Delight in any human relation or 
affection chiefly for the happiness it brings to 
one's self is a perversion of love, and a rever- 
sion of the force that is working out the social 
evolution. Humanity is one body, of which 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 2/ 

each individual life is a function ; human so- 
ciety is one development, of which each indi- 
vidual is God's organ; human history has one 
goal, to the reaching of which each individual 
is consciously to consecrate himself as a living 
member of the social body ; human life has 
one immortality, which is to be gained through 
each individual affection becomins: at last a 
social energy. Only by lifting all human life 
into the light and warmth, the power and fel- 
lowship, of one's highest and holiest love can 
that love be sanctified and immortalized. He 
is no true lover who is not willing to make his 
love the moral property and social good of the 
race ; and, just as God does not want to be 
loved apart from man, no righteous soul will 
want to be loved apart from God and human 
life. He who cares for a friend chiefly because 
he can make that friend's life a continuous 
contribution to his own enjoyment is not only 
base and selfish ; he is a traitor to his friend. 
The exclusiveness of the affections is of the 
devil, and issues in the works of the devil, 
through the withdrawal of the richest and 



28 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

strongest social forces from the sphere of 
their work. The best there is of us is social 
property, belonging to man as well as God ; 
rather, belonging to God by belonging to man. 
Our affections, in every relationship of life, are 
Christian only as they are redemptive energies 
in the world. The loves of our hearts are pure 
only when they glorify humanity in our eyes. 
Our love for those with whom we hold the 
closest fellowship is unrighteous until we make 
it a power of God unto the social salvation. 
We dare isolate in thought no singularly noble 
soul, making the common life seem of low 
worth in the light that should make it glori- 
ous ; for the glory of a great white soul is in 
the fact that it is a revelation of our one 
human life. Unless our affections are lifting 
us to the things that are above the delight of 
self, and are a power lifting the whole human 
life to the righteousness of Jesus, they but 
deepen the shadows of selfishness which so 
long hide the face of God from man. 

The love which regards its nearest object 
as a social agent is the opposite of the feeling 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 29 

that searches for its object the ways of moral 
ease and physical comfort. There is much 
that shows the form and speaks the language 
of love that is without love's substance; much 
that passes for unselfishness that is really 
the crudest selfishness — crudest because it 
is the selfishness of weakness. In family, 
church, and state, w^e are easy with what we 
know to be wrong, with what is expedient or 
relatively right ; we fail of the living and 
unceasing sacrifice of upholding the divine 
ideals. What we are devoutly regarding as 
a love for others is a love of self, and a re- 
gard for our own moral ease. It makes us 
hypocrites towards our neighbors without their 
knowing it, and makes us the deceivers of our 
own selves. 

The failure to discern between the love of 
self and the love of others is a mistake which 
Dr. Gladden makes in a recent discussion of 
*' The Law of the Kingdom." ''There are 
many parents in these days," he says, ''whose 
altruism is carried to a dangerous excess. 
They love their children so much more than 



30 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

they love themselves that they humiliate and 
degrade themselves — weakening their author- 
ity, destroying their influence, and thus de- 
priving themselves of all power to do any 
really good thing for their children." ^ Few 
men see as clearly, or speak as nobly and 
wisely, as Dr. Gladden. Yet what he calls 
a dangerous excess of love on the part of 
parents for their children is not parental 
love, but exactly the lack of love ; it is one 
of the most dangerous forms of selfishness, 
growing out of the worst and weakest self- 
love. The degrading fact with these parents 
is that they do not love their children; they 
are making their children the mere functions 
of parental self-gratification, and the victims 
of parental moral indolence, instead of edu- 
cating them for the social service. Such 
parents regard their own comfort of body and 
ease of mind, their pride and complacency, 
more than either the well-being of their chil- 
dren or the social good. There was once a 
mother whose child was caught for a number 

1 " The Church and The Kingdom/'* p. 68. 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL EAERGIES. 3 1 

of hours in a cold rain, causing rheumatism 
which threatened to cripple the child for life. 
The physician, by every sort of persuasion 
and command, made the mother understand 
that unless she would often move the limbs 
and work the joints of the child, he would 
soon become rigid and helpless. After a few 
feeble attempts, the mother would not do, nor 
would she permit the nurse to do, as the phy- 
sician had ordered. Her constant and pathetic 
plea was that she loved her child so much she 
could not bear to have him suffer the pain 
that came from obeying the physician's com- 
mands. The child became a cripple, and then, 
after two or three years of terrible suffering, 
died. Now, it was not her child the mother 
loved, but herself. She was guilty of the 
most miserable self-love, and was actuated by 
an inordinate regard for her own feelings 
rather than a regard for her child. In the 
ethical and social world, precisely the same 
sort of self-deceit and hypocrisy are masquer- 
ading as love. The selfish affection we are 
apt to call love is separative and disintegrat- 



32 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

ing, exclusive and lustful, deadly and tyran- 
nous, because it is love fallen from its true 
estate. 

This perversion and apostasy of love, so 
current in modern social life, is sending from 
our homes, churches, and schools, young men 
and women untrained in even the first prin- 
ciples of social right and wrong. Even the 
most religious of us are without ethical sense 
regarding human relations. The want of such 
a quality of love in the home, and such a 
knowledge of Jesus' teachings in the pulpit, 
as will make our young men and women 
ethically intelligent, so that they may know 
social right in distinction from social wrong, 
is the most foreboding feature of American 
life and religion. Parents who suffer their 
children to grow up in social ambition, domi- 
nated by the principles that make a virtue of 
covetousness and glorify a career of absorb- 
ing self-interest, should be taught that they 
are the destroyers of their children, and 
social traitors as well. The affections are 
not private property, but social energies. The 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 33 

social responsibility of the affections can 
be unknown or ignored only at the peril of 
both giver and receiver. Yet with nothing 
— not with material gains — are we so self- 
ish and perverse, so individualistic and suici- 
dal, so destructive to human life, as with our 
affections. 

This has its sequence in the wretched 
fraudulency that parades itself in the politi- 
cal arena as patriotism and party fealty; or, 
again, in the religious self-deceit which so 
anxiously exhibits itself as loyalty to the 
church, but which is in effect the subtlest 
and wickedest treason to the church. He 
who ought to know the evil in his household, 
his country, his church, and yet chooses to 
ignore it, making not his life a vicarious sac- 
rifice to bear it away, may think that love is 
the principle of his imagined good-will. But 
this good-will of his is the mask of a cruel 
hypocrisy, which God strips off before his 
nobler brothers at the judgment day of 
some great crisis. When one fails to com- 
mit himself to the highest ideal of right he 



34 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

knows, out of regard for the physical, social, 
or religious comfort of those he loves, he is 
at that moment false to those to whom he 
seems to be true. Frederick Robertson well 
said that, *^he who prefers his dearest friend 
to the call of duty, will soon show that he 
prefers himself to his dearest friend." 

The social responsibility of love cancels aiiy 
warrant for limiting our relations. The new 
religious experience which the social con- 
science is giving us will deliver love from as- 
cetic abandonments, as well as individualistic 
perversion by the pursuit of happiness. That 
love endures and grows only through fulfill- 
ing a social mission, and hence bearing within 
itself a vicarious sorrow, is only a recreant's 
reason for not loving. Not less, but more 
unselfish, love is the remedy for the evils of 
self-seeking affection. To limit and sever our 
human fellowships, rather than bear their re- 
sponsibilities, is weakness and infidelity. As 
sons of God, it is of our moral errantry to ac- 
cept human faiths and affections, with all the 
accumulating responsibilities and sacred sor- 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 35 

rows they bring, and make them the power by 
which we shall be crucified to self; then we 
may rise with those we love into the social 
glory of the kingdom of Christ. Abiding 
in his quality of love, in the secret places of 
the Father's heart, where flows eternally the 
cleansing blood, there we may have given us 
all power in heaven and on earth to keep his 
commandment to love one another as he 
loved his friends. This love will see in every 
human life a brother, an eternal child of the 
heavenly Father, and will be intent upon 
presenting all whom it infolds white and 
whole for the redeemed society. It will ex- 
press itself in a passion of service for the 
unloved and the unloving, and be as free 
from every impurity as the breath of angels. 
For itself it will not speak ; nor seek its own 
joy ; nor be tainted with the bitterness of loss ; 
nor murmur at what God may give against 
desire ; nor grow weary in waiting for the 
gates of life to open ; nor feel baffled at 
work amidst unrequiting selfishness, knowing 
that it obeys the law by which all selfishness 
shall at last be overcome. 



36 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

There is no short road to Moriah, and no 
one can take it in our stead. The journey 
stretches into days, or months, sometimes 
years. But until, with Abraham, we have be- 
come consciously caught in the world move- 
ment, and have been with him to Moriah, to 
sacrifice our life through offering the dearest 
objects of our affections upon the altar of the 
social service, neither we nor those we love 
are fitted to be full partakers of the salvation 
of our God, and of the authority of his Christ. 
When Jesus conditioned discipleship in his 
school of righteousness on a love for himself 
greater than love for father or mother, brother 
or sister, wife or children, it was not that his 
disciples should love these less, but love them 
more. This was no individualistic demand on 
Jesus' part for an affection for himself, but 
a call for supreme devotion to himself as the 
living incarnation of the idea of the righteous 
society. It was the fundamental necessity of 
discipleship that all relations should be ordered 
with a view to realizing the kingdom of heaven 
on the earth, — each individual discipleship be- 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES, 3/ 

coming a social function, and each affection 
a social energy. We never love righteously 
until we are ready to stand by the cross of 
our loved ones, as God stood in the shadow 
of the cross of his Son ; until we love our 
sons and daughters because they lay down 
their lives for the sheep. The most glorious 
career that love can conceive for its object is 
one of complete sacrifice in the service of the 
common life. The affections will realize the 
love from whence they spring by constraining 
every loved one to become consecrate to bear- 
ing away the sins of the world, knowing that 
to choose safety while our brothers are in peril 
is to gain perdition, and that to endure stripes 
and pain for the social healing is to receive the 
life and peace of the Christ, when he cometh 
in the fulness of his kingdom. 

Centuries after Abraham, a holier lesson 
than his was taught by a closing experience 
of Jesus' life. As he stood, on the last even- 
ing, in the gate of his death, his thoughts 
and feelings were mastered by a love for the 
friends who had continued with him in his 



38 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

temptations and divine failures. While he 
talked with them, there seems to have swept 
before him a sort of universal vision of things 
to come. Looking down the years, he saw 
how much slower than he had first expected 
would be the redemption of man, and his 
growth in the righteous society. He had ex- 
pected a national redemption, with a glorious 
world mission for his people, which he had 
been unable to accomplish because of their 
unbelief. This expectation he had yielded 
gradually, month by month, and it was torn 
from his heart with a grief greater than he 
could speak. The fate inevitable to his na- 
tion, having rejected its messianic man and 
opportunity, stood out before him, its most ar- 
dent patriot, and with it the travail and birth, 
the blessing and curse, of a new religion. In 
the long prospect was the growth of this re- 
ligion, losing its early gladness and virility as 
it gained patronage and organization ; passing 
into successive perversions of all he had taught 
or had in mind ; making religion the end of 
man, rather than man the end of religion. It 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 39 

would repeatedly stand for all the things his 
soul had stood against, — the foe of his truest 
friends, the friend of his truest foes. In- 
stitutionalized faith would become the his- 
toric persecutor of the really believing. The 
righteous society must realize itself through 
apostasies and tyrannies, religious wars and 
reformations, orthodox atheisms and outcast 
truths. While any evil remained among men, 
so long as the economy of redemption should 
need to last, the faithful to his ideal must 
have the greatest sufferings and conflicts. 
An intense momentary longing seems to have 
come to him to take his questioning and 
baffled friends away from the immediate reach 
of evil, and from the sorrow of vicarious liv- 
ing. But to withhold them from redemptive 
participation in the world's wrong would be 
to fail in his own faith, and keep from them 
the life he had come to give. Perfect sacri- 
fice had made his life holy ; not in their 
steads, but that they also might be made 
holy through sacrifice in the fullest service. 
In committing those most deeply embosomed 



40 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

in his affections to the law and ideal of his 
own life, while knowing that wrong invested 
with authority would visit its worst revenges 
upon them, Jesus filled up the measure of 
his own sacrifice, and kept his own faith un- 
broken. This purest of moral triumphs can 
be best understood by those who, through 
like experience, have learned joyfully to 
commit whom they would protect to whatever 
destiny may issue from the sacrifice of ser- 
vice. 

In the experience of Abraham with God 
and Isaac is also livingly written a simple 
yet full philosophy of sacrifice. We cannot 
rid ourselves of the word and fact of sacri- 
fice in life, religion, and progress. We shall 
not have done with the word until we know 
its meaning and obey its truth. *'What good 
thing have my brothers," asked Buddha, *^that 
did not come from search and strife and lov- 
ing sacrifice } " The race has found its as- 
cending way, step by step, in the light of 
the fires of its martyrs. He who is most 
consciously caught in the world movement, 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 4 1 

and best fulfils his life as a function therein, 
most surely walks the path that rises by 
the way of Calvary. Upon those who wear 
the dignity of divine sonship, and give out the 
virtue of the healing joy, may be seen the 
marks of moral tragedy. And the way of 
sacrifice along which the race toils to its di- 
vine destiny — a way of toil and suffering 
because it has been a way of sin — is tracked 
with the blood of the feet of the Almighty. 
When Jesus taught the renunciation of self as 
the law of human growth, when he pointed 
to the cross as the gate to life and free- 
dom, he brought forth something which had 
been wrought out in the experience of God. 
There is a sense in which God grows, and 
grows through giving his glory to his crea- 
tion. The universe is, in fact, an eternal 
development of the life of God through sacri- 
fice ; it is the eternal becoming of God in 
obedience to the law of his being. 

In the universal religious consciousness, 
sacrifice has been the great fundamental fact. 
The primitive and ethnic idea of sacrifice 



42 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

was always that of setting something apart 
as pleasing unto the deity, to be offered to 
him upon the altar ; but at the heart of 
even the most monstrous offerings was al- 
ways present the notion that the sacrifice 
effected human welfare. In Hebrew sacri- 
fices the redemption and ethical idea had 
larger place and growth than in the ethnic 
religions, but not without perversion. Re- 
ligious perversion has persistently conceived 
sacrifice to be a substitute for righteousness. 
In essence and ethic the theological con- 
ceptions of sacrifice are as monstrous and 
immoral as the rudest and crudest ethnic 
conceptions ; they are not only not differ- 
ent, but are historically and ethically the 
same, the old tribal and pagan conceptions 
of sacrifice surviving in modern theological 
terms. The notion of the sacrifice of one 
as constituting a substitute for the right- 
eousness of others, whether baldly expressed, 
or unconsciously accepted by religious expe- 
rience, is the curse of both religion and 
society; it lies at the heart of the false com- 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 43 

mercial integrities, the social hypocrisies 
and tyrannies, the political corruptions and 
legalized anarchies, committed by the reli- 
gious. 

Ethically and Christianly, sacrifice is love 
offering a holy life upon the altar of the com- 
mon need. In reality, sacrifice is the eternal 
definition of righteousness. A better knowl- 
edge of Jesus, of God, and human life, will 
finally teach us, what we ought long ago to 
have learned, that no life is conceivably right- 
eous that is not purposely lived for the com- 
mon good ; that no life is to be thought of 
as Christian that is not made sacred for the 
social service, and thus fully sacrificed in bear- 
ing away the sins of the world. 

Then it is not a divinely forced circum- 
stance, but the simplest and most orderly 
proceeding, that we should be taught in a 
lesson of sacrifice the social function of the 
affections. By nothing else than perfect 
sacrifice can the affections be realized or 
understood. Sacrifice and affection are one 
and the same fact, as we shall one day learn ; 



44 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

and society, in its last analysis, in its full re- 
alization, is nothing else than the organized 
love of the people in obedience to the law 
A sacrifice. 

This is not altruism, by which is meant 
man as an individual struggling for the good 
of other individuals ; it is man as a social 
being fulfilling his life as a function of the 
social organism, as a living member of the 
one social body. Once committed to sacrifice 
as the fundamental fact of religion, as the 
law of human growth, a pure socialism be- 
comes the only form through which religion 
can express itself in life and progress. And 
religion becomes superstition and tyranny, with 
metaphysical definition and political degrada- 
tion following, when not translated into terms 
of social values, and manifested in social 
justice. 

Save through the apprehension of sacrifice 
as the law of social and universal gravity, 
human justice and peace, order and harmony, 
are a dream never to become fact. Recon- 
ciliation to this law, as the organizing and 



THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES. 45 

administrative law of our life and its institu- 
tions, is the world's sabbath of social rest, 
which we have not yet entered because of the 
hardening of our hearts with the evil of un- 
belief, but which we shall finally enter, to 
make progress thenceforth in peace and not 
in strife. Into the social sabbath, where all 
the promises of justice will at last be fulfilled 
in a social body that shall take from each ac- 
cording to his powers and give to each accord- 
ing to his needs, where a glory greater than 
the visions of the prophets awaits the common 
life, and a joy that hath not entered yet the 
heart of man, the race will be led by a divine 
spirit of moral adventure, which shall put life, 
with its dearest and all, on the altar of a 
perfect and living sacrifice to the world's so- 
cial redemption and destiny. The men and 
women in whom this spirit shall become fully 
and vicariously incarnate will be so caught in 
the world movement, and so charged with mes- 
sianic forces, that to fall back into the pursuit 
of individual happiness would be to them the 
worst possible torment ; they will put the 



46 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

social wisdom and power of sacrifice to tests 
so true and practical that every mind shall 
at last understand, and every knee bow to 
acknowledge the dominion and glory of the 
law by which Jesus saves and reigns. 



II. 

ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 

Gen. XXXII. 24-29. 



He loved money, because the man who does not love money is a 
Socialist, and a Socialist is a Nihilist, and a Nihilist is an Atheist. And an 
Atheist is a man who has no religion. Therefore, the love of money being 
the root of all religion, he loved money because he was a religious man. 

He loved it with a humble, tranquil veneration of its majesty, recogniz- 
ing it gratefully as the sheet-anchor of that respectability which, to him, 
represented the good ship of state. To Cornelia it was merely a source 
of personal enjoyment — either of what you yourself possessed, as mani- 
fested, for instance, in the purchase of pine-apples — or of what your neigh- 
bors lacked, as exemplified when your pine-apples were bigger than any- 
body else's. To Hendrik it was a wondrous beneficent Omnipotence, 
enthroned in all that is not only great, but also good, the enemy of the 
improper, the improvident, the tattered, the discontented, in a word, the 
one tangible bulwark against the chaos of the anti-cosmos. He could not 
have reasoned it out, perhaps ; but to him and his co-religionists the god 
of the Cosmos, its originator and its upholder, was gold. He was not alto- 
gether unreasonable, surely. The original King may have been Love, 
but his subjects have deposed him. — Maarten Maartens, in " God's Fool." 

For as their religion, so their cross, is very gaudy and triumphant : but 
in what? In precious metals and gems, the spoil of superstition upon 
the people's pockets. These crosses are made of earthly treasure, instead 
of teaching the hearts of those who wear them, to deny it : and like them, 
they are respected for their finery. A rich cross shall have many gazers 
and admirers : the mean in this, as other things, are more neglected. I 
could appeal to themselves of this great vanity and superstition. Oh ! how 
very short is this of the blessed cross of Jesus, that takes away the sins of 
the world ! — William Penn^ in *' No Cross No Crown." 

48 



II. 

ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him 
until the break of day. And when he saw that he prevailed not 
against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh ; and the hollow of 
Jacob's thigh was strained, as he wrestled with him. And he said, 
Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, 
except thou bless me. And he said unto him. What is thy name ? 
And he said, Jacob. And he said. Thy name shall be called no more 
Jacob, for thou hast striven with God and with man, and hast pre- 
vailed. — Gen. xxxii. 24-29. 

In nothing is there more of both delight and 
help than the way in which the Hebrew, with 
his strong prophetic imagination, and accord- 
ing to that simplicity and wonder with which 
■he regarded the natural world, tells of his 
religious struggles and impulses in terms of 
the objective and pictorial. 

Like that of Jesus' temptation in the wilder- 
ness, the story of Jacob's wrestling is a vivid 
objectified description of a fateful subjective 
experience, towards which all past experiences 

49 



50 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

had been converging, out of which were to issue 
vast destinies. We need not materialize the 
scene in order to translate it into the lano-uag-e 
of our common need. The struggle was real 
enough, gathering the tendencies of a nation's 
life, as well as the moral fate of the man him- 
self, into the agony of a single night. The 
night wrestling of man with man by Jabbok 
ford puts before us the decisive conflict be- 
tween God and self in Jacob's life, with God 
as victor, and evil stripped of its religious dis- 
guise. Jacob emerged from the crisis a new 
man with a new name. He was no longer* 
Jacob the supplanter, but Israel the prince 
of God. The disposition to live with God 
independent of his relations to men was now 
subjected to the effort to live with God in and 
throusrh his relations. In the moral heat of 
the struggle, the poison of Cain was purged 
from the Hebrew's life. 

Through his previous years Jacob had been 
a religious man, worshipping God as he knew 
him, his life doubtless moving on a higher 
plane of conduct than the average life in neigh- 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 5 I 

boring tribes. In the way that seemed practi- 
cable, considering the manner of world in which 
he lived, he had thought himself a servant of 
God. I take him to have been up to this crisis 
much such a character, in his relation to his 
times, as the averao;e Christian who now suc- 
ceeds in business. He had been a scheming 
and grasping man of affairs, chiefly intent upon 
his material prosperity, crediting his large 
gains to the special favor of God, and appro- 
priating religion as a contribution to his indi- 
vidual career. 

According to current ethics, much might be 
said to justify Jacob's course, and even to 
make him an exemplary character, — such a 
one as we would call to preside over religious 
conventions, and glorify as a providentially 
reared benefactor. His business relations were 
with an idolatrous world, and he was caught 
in a system of things. If he tried to deal 
with men according to the righteousness that 
haunted his dreams, would he not lose the 
accumulations of his thrift, and the Lord thus 
lose his gifts } Then his wives were hard to 



$2 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

get along with, — selfish, ambitious, quarrel- 
some. Above all, he was religious ; and how 
injudicious and unreasonable it would be in us 
to go measuring piety by financial methods in 
so influential a man, likely at any time to have 
money to give to our benefactions and institu- 
tions ! 

Still, Jacob was not satisfied. Neither was 
God. The man could not rid himself of the 
feeling that God was disappointed in his life, 
and without pleasure in his career. This 
mutual dissatisfaction brought about the ex- 
perience by Jabbok ford. Having over-reached 
Laban, his father-in-law, in Mesopotamia, he 
had stolen away with his family, his servants 
and herds, and likely what else he could lay 
hands on, to come into the land of his father, 
Isaac, from which he had fled from the wrath 
of his brother Esau, whom he had defrauded, 
twenty years before. The pursuit of Laban, 
a dread of the revenge of his wronged brother, 
a deepening sense of the separateness of his 
life, all gave God an opportunity to press 
close upon Jacob's soul. When reaching the 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 53 

Jordan, he remembered that he had passed 
over it, at the beginning of his career, with 
no possession but his staff; now he was 
returning with a rich caravan. The unchan- 
ging goodness of God contrasted mightily with 
his own faithlessness. '' I am not worthy/' 
he confessed to the Lord, '' of the least of all 
thy mercies, and of all the truth which thou 
hast showed unto thy servant." Whether 
he had heard of his warlike brother's feacs 
of arms, or whether he was over-wrought 
with the fear which the unknown always 
begets in a soul consciously parleying with 
God, he knew that some profound moral 
change was required of him. As he con- 
sidered his great increase of wealth, still 
taking it to be the gain of a specially favor- 
ing Providence, there mingled with his grati- 
tude an agony of remorse. Rude as was his 
moral sense, this grandson of Abraham had 
in him enough of his ethical inheritance to 
be deeply conscious that something was wrong 
about his possession of this wealth. Some- 
how, there seemed to come over him an in- 



54 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

definable sense of the ethical incongruity of 
thanking God for having so providentially 
helped him to cheat and steal. He did not 
live at a time when, by giving a trifle from his 
robberies to endow a university, he could un- 
wittingly make such a clear revelation of the 
moral apostasy of religion as to enable him 
to think highly of himself. So he was caught 
in the characteristic Hebrew conviction that 
there is no ground for forgiveness for the 
past, no assurance for the future, save in the 
largest possible restitution for wrong-doing. 
For years God had been hard pursuing Jacob 
to this point, and now the decisive conflict 
was come. The shame of the past, now a 
threatening cloud over the future, intensified 
the solitude of the Syrian night, in which 
the soul of God, in the person of a man, met 
Jacob's soul in moral battle. Deny or ignore, 
forget or sophisticate, work how he would, 
down in the deeps of his being he had known 
better than his w^ay of living. The hand 
that now held him in this crisis and peril had 
repeatedly smitten his conscience with fear- 



ECONOMICS AiVD RELIGION. 55 

ful blows that would not heal. He had often 
overthrown the pursuing sense of wrong, 
only to be sternly laid hold of again by this 
hand, and brought face to face with the 
actual truth about himself. Evade as he 
would, put off as he would, the judgment 
time came at last, bringing him face to face 
with the ethical realities of his life, his soul 
naked to his own gaze. 

The wrestling of Jacob was no religious 
ecstasy, no mysterious experience, but was 
grounded in financial transactions. He wres- 
tled with the question of what to do with 
his accumulations of wealth ; shekels and 
camels were component elements of his agony. 
The story is set in an economic problem ; it 
is essentially an economic revelation. Clearly, 
when read historically, it was wrong relations 
with his fellow-men that formed the subject 
of Jacob's experience. He had been trying 
to be religious, to be God's servant, by 
makino: his relio:ion an individualistic relation 
to God, — a relation to God apart from his 
relations to man. He was squeezed into 



56 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

moral plasticity between the finished pursuit 
of his wife's father and the anticipated at- 
tack of his brother. It was a man who 
wrestled with him until break of day'; not 
God apart from man, nor a demigod. He 
prevailed with God through prevailing with 
man, or prevailed with God in man ; he gained 
the blessing of God in gaining the blessing 
of man. Nothing more distinctly discloses 
the social ground of religious experience than 
this story of Jacob's wrestling. 

That God seeks man is the first fact of 
religion. God wants from man an intelligent 
intimacy with his thought ; a conscious one- 
ness with his purposes and work ; a close 
abiding in his affections ; a fellowship with 
the realities of his being. The soul of God 
sorrows to make itself understood, while his 
heart hungers for human sympathy. The 
Father longs to share all he is and has with 
sons who will know and love. As one of 
the early Christian writers used to repeat, 
" God has a need and craving for thee, hav- 
ing made thee divine for his glory." The 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 57 

Bible is a record of God's progressive dis- 
closure of himself in man. The fellowship 
of God with man revealed in Jesus is the 
point to which the older scriptures ascend, 
and from which the newer scriptures proceed. 
The picture which the Old Testament pre- 
sents is always one of God visiting man, often 
without man's seeking. Abraham is God's 
friend and confidant, whom God sends into a 
far country to found a new nation, Hebrew 
history thus beginning in the intimacy of God 
with a man. God appears to question in his 
mind whether he ought not to confide to his 
friend Abraham the secret of the judgment he 
is about to visit on Sodom. Jacob, when leav- 
ing the old home to make a new, dreams of 
a ladder between heaven and earth, witness- 
ing to the one reality of the two, with the 
angels of God climbing up and down. From 
Abraham to Jesus, through the course of de- 
velopment from Moses to David, in the vis- 
ions and labors of the prophets, God draws 
closer to man in each new development, at 



58 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

last to behold the image of himself, the moral 
glory of his being, in the Son of his love. 
In Jesus, God gains that oneness with man 
which he sought back in the experiences of 
Abraham and Jacob ; that oneness which is 
the human goal, and which can alone satisfy 
the Father with his sons. 

That man seeks God is the second fact of 
religion. Human progress has been a quest 
on the part of man for harmonious and work- 
ing relations with God. In the deeps of our 
being, we feel that there is a perfect right- 
eousness, an eternal harmony, a strifeless and 
endless progress, for which we- have been 
created ; which we shall at last apprehend 
and have peace. The most occupied of men, 
those with the strongest lusts of money or 
flesh, with the greatest intellectual or religious 
greeds, have some continuing sense of being 
away from home, while seeking home by ways 
that lead them farther from their destination. 
The divine unrest of life brings us all to camp 
by Jabbok fords ev^ry night, where we are 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 59 

harassed by the discord of our relations with 
our brothers and with God, when we have 
planned to be left alone. In the lone mid- 
night hour, in the crowded street, in the 
counting-room, in the student's quarters, we 
are in ceaseless pursuit of God when we know 
it not ; when we least expect it, we stumble 
upon burning bushes where God waits us. 
The quest of God, whom no man by mere 
searching hath found out, has been alike the 
joy and the tragedy of our human evolution. 
This search has its living, though misread, 
inspiration in what Frederic Harrison calls 
the '^ascendency of simple goodness" in both 
historical and personal crises. The princes 
of God are always mightier and more feared, 
and thus likely to be taken for public ene- 
mies by institutions and authorities, than the 
supplanters, whose foundations the princes 
dig away for the foundations of the holy so- 
ciety. When a soul feels the touch of God, 
it takes on something of God's moral dignity. 
To one who hears and heeds the whispers of 
God, he gives a sense of his own responsi- 



6o SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

bility, with that unmeasured authority over 
men and things which so empowered the 
souls of the prophets and apostles. Though 
the life in which God has prevailed is pro- 
foundly humble, it is yet conscious that God's 
almightiness belongs to it, and moves upon 
its mission as though the destinies of the 
earth depended upon its effort — as they do. 
The wisest sage, the strongest warrior, the 
cunningest accumulative merchant, resist as 
each may, feels foolish and helpless in the 
presence and power of a real saint's white 
soul. No measure has ever been found to 
man's capacity for righteousness ; no reckon- 
ing to the moral might which God may 
manifest in human life through a single soul. 
Even in those classed worthless, we are 
always catching glimpses of potential saint- 
hood ; the stupid and ignorant, hedged in by 
the most difficult environment, become ethical 
marvels, spiritually messianic. *'The majesty 
of goodness " is both more sovereign and 
potent in the common life than the prudent 
and strong know. 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 6 1 

But between this seeking of God for man 
and seeking of man for God is a vast and con- 
tinued resistance to God on the part of man. 
By every device the evil genius of self-will can 
conceive, both religious and openly rebellious, 
we seek to evade coming to close quarters with 
God ; we try to hide from our eyes the ethical 
realities of our life. We are willing to wor- 
ship ; to believe the doctrines commonly ac- 
cepted by organized religion ; to support a 
clergy and be benevolent ; to be devoutly pious, 
so far as anything may be required of us by 
the church ; to conduct our life according to 
profitable moral codes current ; to be full of 
the integrity that accrues from the precious fic- 
tions of economic laws. But our real career is 
apt to be a living prayer to the good Lord to 
deliver us from actual obedience ; while the 
history of official religion is largely the record 
of organized substitutes for righteousness. We 
make life a game of hide and seek with God. 
Knowing our wrong, feeling God's hard pur- 
suit, through long years we put off the deci- 
sive conflict, looking for a salvation of circum- 



62 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

stances to take the place of a salvation of 
obedience ; hoping that God will interpose by 
yet unforeseen events, send fearful suffering 
even, — for we would all rather suffer than 
obey, — to take from us the moral responsi- 
bility of decision. We do not mean this hide 
and seek with God as rebellion. But rebellion 
it is of the subtlest and fatalest sort, — a per- 
sistent demand upon God for quarter, instead 
of a loving acceptance of his will as our meat 
and drink. 

The worst result of this resistance is ethical 
insanity ; and the worst of this insanity is its 
unquestioning belief that it is sane. It is thus 
that the world may go straight to perdition 
under the guide of what we are pleased to term 
a clear conscience. The genius of evil knows, 
what the average religious man ignores, that 
sincerity may be no indication of righteous- 
ness. Cruel and blind bigotry, and the idle 
and commonplace vices, may be alike sincere. 
Detestable moral juggling, graceless ethical 
sophistry, social oppression and iniquity, all 
stalk among men in the cloak of conscientious- 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION, 6^ 

ness, wearing the solemn or smiling face of 
sincerity. The hardest fact of evil to be dealt 
with is the clear conscience with which the 
strongest and most accursed wrongs are done. 
If there is such a part of man's ethical being 
as our immoral moral sciences call conscience, 
it is none the less true that the conscience is 
a safe guide only when God is the guide of 
the conscience. Conscientiousness may be in 
no wise righteousness. 

Yet there are terrible awakenings from the 
darkness of our clear consciences ; there is an 
ethical insanity that discovers itself to be not 
sane, and through this discovery comes a fearful 
return to our moral senses. This accounts for 
the close relation of great moral developments 
to great sufferings. Though God sought Jacob 
in a time of extremity, hours passed before 
the self in Jacob was overcome. While Paul's 
revelation of truth was abundant beyond his 
power to disclose, by some unrevealed pain 
or shame he was kept humble. Peter was a 
human rock on which Jesus might build ; but 
Peter dared not forget the floods of passion 



64 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

which sometimes swept him far away from the 
foundation in which he was laid. Even when 
we know we are parleying with God, our contro- 
versies with him we do not quickly settle. God 
has to wound and bruise, strain our thighs and 
stick thorns in our flesh, tear up deep roots 
of self-will, wrench our affections until each 
moment is a condensed eternity of pain, before 
we become plastic in the divine mould. Like 
Jacob, we have to be squeezed into moral plas- 
ticity between vanishing and awaiting extremi- 
ties. In the social organism it takes a Spanish 
Inquisition to usher in religious freedom, and 
a French Revolution to translate this into po- 
litical freedom ; God knows what it may yet 
cost to translate both into the freedom of 
economic equality ! 

But in the midst of this long resistance, 
with the pain and waste it brings, is the per- 
verted seeking after God, which is the worst 
fact of historical religion. Though perverted 
seeking be but a disguised or unconscious re- 
sistance, the element of perversion is vaster 
and deeper than the element of positive re- 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 65 

sistance. Jacob's trouble was a wrong or un- 
social seeking of God, rather than a direct 
disobedience ; a quest of God as power, rather 
than a seeking of God as righteousness. Our 
common trouble is the quest of God in the 
terms of religion rather than in the terms of 
actual life. We search for God independent 
of the human facts with which we are in 
daily touch, and which are the fund of life's 
real experience. 

The logic of the search for God in religious 
rather than social terms is the priestly con- 
ception of religion, as certainly modern as it 
is heathen, and Protestant as well as Roman 
and Greek, always depending upon mysteries 
between God and man. The theological meta- 
physics which supports religion as a thing in 
itself, as a cult of worship, rather than an 
organization of right relations, are the ancient 
mysteries in modern forms. God hates mys- 
tery ; while in religious mystery selfish man 
revels, as he cultivates perplexity in econom- 
ics, because he thereby escapes social duty. 
Mystery in religion, with its theological or 



66 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

ecclesiastical priesthood, is the one sure ground 
of the tyranny of wealth and of corruption 
in the state. It is thus wholly logical that 
monopoly now swiftly tends, as it is every- 
where tending, to the support of ecclesias- 
ticism and theology. That official religion 
should first forget, then hold in disrepute, the 
religion of social aspiration and human fact, 
is the natural development of religious mys- 
tery into economic tyranny and social anarchy. 
Religion is not the dispensation of any 
priesthood, either ecclesiastical or theological, 
one of which is as evil to society as the other. 
No set of men can control the course of God's 
righteousness in human life, nor monopolize 
the Holy Ghost. God breathes his Spirit on 
whom he pleases, being pleased with all who 
hunger and thirst after righteousness ; and 
we cannot tell whence that Spirit cometh or 
whither it goeth. Obedience to the highest 
right and fullest service they know, is the 
organ of God's larger revelations of himself to 
men. His sweetest messages are not written 
in books nor spoken by priests. God gives his 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 6/ 

strength to human weakness by modes sim- 
pler than the thought of man can compre- 
hend or the words of man express. Service 
is the language of the soul, by which soul 
speaks to soul on earth ; by which the soul 
of God speaks to the soul of Jacob and Paul, 
to your soul and mine. It is no part of the 
religious experience of the prophets and apos- 
tles of Jesus which enthrones God in an infi- 
nite nowhere, there in an eternal fret about 
what we conceive to be his own glory, ap- 
proachable chiefly in terms of theological defi- 
nitions, ordinances of worship, or religious 
organizations. One may have true and clear 
opinions about God, and express them in strict 
and reputable forms of worship, yet be withal 
the more infidel, even atheistic. In the realm 
of righteousness, nothing is more colossally 
impudent than that the people should be told 
what to believe by religious monopolies, which 
distract the world in trials of men for heresies 
on questions of Hebrew philology, or refuse 
to trust the message of redemption with men 
who think too ethically or hopefully of the 



68 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

Son of God ; and this, while ecclesiastically 
ignorant of the great problems of right and 
wrong bearing a chosen nation to a fearful 
crisis, if not catastrophe. Considering his 
times and training, Nero fiddling while Rome 
burned is not a more shocking moral spectacle. 
The chief characteristic of Biblical religion, 
from Moses to Jesus, is the revelation of 
God in the simplest facts of the common 
life, in the terms of social effort. Fellow- 
ship with God is Scripturally disclosed in 
anything but occult or mythological modes, 
mysterious or theological terms. Both the 
legal and prophetic revelations of the Old 
Testament are in terms always sociological, 
and but incidentally theological ; in forms 
distinctly political, having to do with social 
conditions and political outlooks. Moses has 
revelations concerning sanitary laws, architec- 
ture, marriage relations, land ownership, good 
government, and the commonwealth of soci- 
ety. Elijah and Isaiah, with all the prophets, 
are social and national reformers. David is 
a man of affairs, and Ezekiel a. teacher of 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 69 

political ethics. Jesus is simply reared, a 
carpenter by trade, and seems to live the 
most domestic of lives in his parental home 
and among his friends. His teachings or 
doctrines have to do with human relations, 
and are more distinctly economic than what 
we understand by the term religious. His 
ideal is social, and his work to redeem men 
for the righteous society called the kingdom 
of heaven. He reveals the relation of God 
to man in the simplest movements of na- 
ture, in the ordinary tasks of the common 
life, in the most explicit terms of economic 
communism. Christianity comes from him, 
not as a theological or ecclesiastical system, 
but as a revelation of life ; not as a cult of 
worship, but as a social ideal, to be realized 
in a human order in which all shall live for 
the common good. 

The social ground of religious experience 
is then a fundamental fact of religion. We 
cannot hold fellowship with God apart from 
the particulars of our occupation and career, 
apart from our daily relations with men and 



yo SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

things. Religious experiences outside the 
terms of work and fact are a fiction and an 
evil, leading men and religion astray, and leav- 
ing human life unredeemed in the hands of 
its enemies. We know the legend that Ju- 
lian the emperor once said that it is much 
easier to worship Jesus than to obey him. 
Whether the saying be Julian's or not, it is 
true in Christian history and experience. It 
is easy to be worshipfully or professionally 
religious ; to be just and righteous is quite 
another matter. Religion is relations ; and a 
right relation with God is primarily a right 
relation with human life, where the God of 
man is. The social fruit of individual reli- 
gious experience is its value alike to God 
and man; it is without value except it change 
and ethically glorify the actual facts of life. 

The religious, because social, test of life 
is in the quality of our relations with men 
of all sorts and conditions. This test comes 
to us amidst our work in the school, the 
factory, the mine, the workshop, the farm ; 
amidst the highly respectable dishonesties of 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 7 1 

the counting-room, and the wretched integri- 
ties of commercial conceit ; amidst the average 
pastorate, where sweet religious lies become 
habitual before recognized, destroying both 
intellectual and ethical manhood, and often 
putting a reputable moral emaciate in the 
place of a man ; amidst home experiences, 
which are the social fountain, and where our 
lives falsify all our ideals. That the banker 
does not open his bank in the morning with 
the doxology, that the legislation of the state 
is not worded in religious phraseology, that 
the carpenter does not saw off each board 
with the Lord's Prayer, that the merchant does 
not dismiss his customers with the benedic- 
tion, that the judge does not convene court 
with chapters from Leviticus, that the insu- 
rance company does not print the Sermon on 
the Mount in its policies, renders these op- 
erations none the less social sacraments and 
rituals of justice; they are all religion. Who- 
ever casts from his bank door, or barn 
door, or factory door, or club-house door, or 
political-caucus door, or ball-room door, or 



Jl SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

kitchen door, the social shrine, is so far an 
atheist. For atheism is God-out-ness from 
Hfe ; and religion is God-in-ness in life, mak- 
ing every human act and intercourse a re- 
ligious rite. 

The judgment of the social test no true 
religious experience can doubt. To be mor- 
ally splendid in the heat of public conflict, 
in the thick of controversy and joined bat- 
tle, even in martyr-fire or dungeon chain, is 
easier than to fulfil the sacrifice of service 
with the things and duties in hand. '^It is 
strange,'' said Mazzini, " but true, that men 
who are ready, if need be, to shed their blood 
for liberty, yet shrink from that pecuniary 
sacrifice by which that blood might often be 
spared.'' A small and often deceitful matter 
it is to become a leader of religion, to endow 
great philanthropies, to be known and hon- 
ored by the successful ; it is the fulfilment 
of the plain career as a social function that 
best makes life a glory of God. The faith 
that removes mountains, that produces shel- 
tered and protected religious devotees, that 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 73 

gives bodies to be burned for truth's sake, is 
not so great as the faith that loves the unloving 
and unlovable, and glorifies God by making 
the commonest tasks reveal him. The work 
given us to do is the altar of our approach 
to God, and the way we do it our worship. 

That ours is a world of fact and toil, with 
the gulf between the ideal and the real 
greater than the purest and strongest seem 
able to pass, I do not forget. To the tru- 
est and bravest, life often proves a school of 
slow and sad disenchantment. There is bread 
to earn, it is true, with children to be reared, 
and an immeasurable weight of communal 
sin to be borne. But always amidst stern 
conditions has the glory of the Lord shone 
round about the sons of men. Moses was 
transfigured on a political errand to God, 
seeking the right sort of legislation by which 
to make a nation out of a tribe of degraded 
slaves. The ethical reality of Jesus' life was 
evolved by hard experiences. His moral glory 
was in the fact that it was an incarnation 
of, as well as in, the common life. While 



74 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

Herod and Pilate govern the state, and wicked 
Caiaphas and prudent Nicodemus rule the 
church, with Gamaliel in the schools, the 
Messias comes a carpenter's son, bringing 
a peasant education, speaking the familiar ac- 
cents of the common life, a simple man of 
the people. 

The value of even that which is terribly 
personal, and which makes each profound ex- 
perience in some sense exceptional, is finally 
its social value ; its redemptive value to the 
common life. As was once said by Robert 
Louis Stevenson, himself one of the wholest 
and sweetest of human spirits, as well as 
one of the most helpful religious teachers, 
'' We are all the inheritors of sin ; we must all 
bear and expiate a past which was not ours." 
We all feel ourselves deformed and beaten 
by the wilful or heedless irresponsibility of 
relations which are our responsibilities, and 
are all compelled to walk tortuous paths 
with bleeding feet because of obstacles and 
defeats pressed upon us by faithlessness. 
Some have one who utterly, and for all they 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 75 

can see hopelessly, prevents their life from 
being the moral glory it would, restraining 
it from its lawful career; one from whom 
they have a right to expect the gladdest and 
most living sympathy, and yet who lightly 
disregards all they hold sacred, ruthlessly 
outrages all their sacramental senses, and 
tears from their life the holiest expectations 
of youth and hope ; one who hampers and 
baffles in such a way that they appear both 
to themselves and the world to be the wrong- 
ful rather than the wronged. But these are 
our social commissions ; they are forces pre- 
paring our life for the social service, — the 
feeding of the sheep. Thorns in our flesh 
are our disgrace, and not God's glory, if 
they do not commission our life as a divine 
errantry among men, and become component 
elements of its social power. Our wrestling 
all night at Jabbok ford but morally weakens 
and emaciates, if we do not make restitution 
to our brother ; to our brother of the tribe 
of Esau at that, and in clear violation of 
accepted economic ethics. 



^6 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

The divorce of piety from economics, with 
the consequent unmoral influence of religion 
and the degradation of politics, is indicated by 
nothing more clearly than the contemptuous 
meaning which has come to be attached to the 
word holiness. By the holy man is meant, 
in the popular thought, simply no man at all ; 
while the word primitively meant a whole hu- 
man man, normally fulfilling all the natural 
functions of his life in their wholeness. " The 
separation of the holy man from the virtuous 
man,'* says Amiel, is one of '^the signs of a 
false religious conception,'' and ''true Christian- 
ity must purge itself from so disastrous a mis- 
take." The Holy Ghost, or the Whole Spirit, 
is given to run the world with, and the teach- 
ings of Jesus are a revelation of the world 
rightly run. The piety that finds market and 
state uninteresting as religious spheres, or that 
ignores them through material, intellectual, or 
spiritual interests, is a delusion and a curse. 
Devotion to God is complete sacrifice of self 
in the service of man, and ecstasies are with- 
out value that do not fruit in ethics. Pure 



I 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 7/ 

religion and undefiled before our God and 
Father is this, — to visit the fatherless and 
widows in their affliction, and to keep un- 
spotted one's self from the world. The clean 
putting away of evil doings, the seeking jus- 
tice and relieving the oppressed, is the condi- 
tion upon which the Lord invites us to reason 
with him in the things of religion. 

Of religion as rightly related life, even the 
early Puritan of New England, too much ac- 
cused of the individualism which character- 
izes his descendants, had a most solemn sense. 
Economic pressure upon his religious reason 
had much to do with his emigration. Writing 
of England in 1629, John Winthrop says : *' This 
land grows weary of her inhabitants, so as man 
who is most precious of all creatures is here 
more vile and base than the earth we tread 
upon, and of less price among us than a horse 
or a sheep." ^' Children, servants, and neigh- 
bors," he writes, ** especially if they be poor, 
are counted the greatest burdens, which, if 
things were right, would be the chiefest earthly 
blessings." ''Why then," he asks, ''should we 



78 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

stand here striving for places of habitation and 
in the meantime suffer a whole continent, as 
fruitful and convenient for the use of man, to 
lie waste without any improvement ? '' This 
he premises with the declaration that ^*the 
whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath 
given it to the sons of men/' In the Confes- 
sion adopted by the Puritan colonists at Salem 
on the 6th of August, 1628, they covenanted 
'' to approve themselves to the Lord in their 
worldly callings, shunning idleness as the bane 
of any state, and not to deal hardly or oppres- 
sively with any/' ^ Though he knew nothing 
of our social and economic terms, behind the 
Puritan's intense religious individualism lay a 
sublime social ideal. He would be free, but 
not with the freedom that was an end in 
itself ; he sought freedom for the sake of 
what he conceived to be the godly brother- 
hood, the divine order. He sought a righteous 
commonwealth as the true manifestation of 
his religion. Sojourner that he was in a 

1 '^ The Pilgrim Fathers in New England," Dr. John Brown, 

pp. 287, 298, 



J 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 79 

strange land, refugee from religious oppres- 
sion and political craft, he yet looked for a 
heavenly country on earth, to be found in 
holy political facts. 

To-day, as a result of the material interests 
that have absorbed both religion and life, we 
scarcely have a religion ; we have no real 
faith for which men are willing to risk life 
and all. Churches and clergy, prayer-meetings 
and benevolences, neither constitute religion 
nor furnish social morality ; piety no longer 
indicates righteousness, either in theory or 
practice. Beloved brethren will wrestle the 
night through, or at least a part of the night, 
in revival prayers ; but the revival we need is 
the restitution of stolen goods, of wealth 
gained through oppression, extortion, and eco- 
nomic atheism. The rebuke of Edward III. 
to the Pope at Avignon, to the effect that 
^' the successor of the apostles was set over 
the Lord's sheep to feed and not to shear 
them,*' is pertinent to our present religious 
situation ; it is applicable to the priests of 
the market and the popes of industry, who 



8o SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

are the now influential factors in organized 
religion. These will give feasts in the name 
of Jesus ; but the testimony Jesus asks is the 
renunciation of economic plunder, and a sacri- 
fice of self for the common good. Pastors 
may secure active participation in municipal 
reforms from the very men who buy the city's 
councils and loot its people, but only to find 
the city in a last state worse than the first. 
It is good that shepherds and bishops try 
experiments in the slums ; but suppose they 
try the sacrifice of preaching the Sermon on 
the Mount from the pulpits of wealth ! The 
church will accept philanthropies ; but is it 
ready to be despised and rejected by the rich 
and powerful, that it may seek the justice of 
the kingdom of God ? 

Organized religion gives no sign of the 
great religious movement upon which the so- 
cial salvation depends. Social faith and effort 
are moving on outside of, and largely in oppo- 
sition to, organized religion ; its leaders who 
come from, are not of, the church. As surely 
as Jesus found the Jews building up a reli- 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION 8 1 

gion apart from the human situation ; as Rome 
was building apart from the human fact when 
Luther came ; so we Protestants are now build- 
ing apart from the human need that calls for 
our sacrifice. Dr. Parkhurst in New York 
is no more an answer to this charge than 
Savonarola in Florence is an answer to Protes- 
tant charges against Rome. Protestant Chris- 
tianity, in that it represents property and 
religious systems more than righteousness 
and social faith, is practically a caste religion ; 
and this in spite of its missions, exceptional 
institutional churches, and ludicrous willingness 
to receive the poor. With Dr. Bruce, I am a 
pessimist as regards the church, and an opti- 
mist as regards the kingdom. The hope of 
social democracy is itself the religious aspi- 
ration and effort of the common life to real- 
ize its sanctity ; and organized religion offers 
no present channel for this realization. The 
church must repent of its manifest subjection 
to money, and free its institutions from ser- 
vile dependence thereupon, if it is to avert the 
necessity of God's turning to the churchless 



82 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

peoples, or to the peoples regardless of the 
church, to find new channels for the redemp- 
tive life that is to heal the nations. 

In fact, the influence of the church upon 
the social movement presents to me the great- 
est occasion of dread for the future. I con- 
fess this dread, with the fullest recognition of 
the anxious seeking for righteousness on the 
part of a greater number of individuals in the 
church than ever before. In a profound sense, 
the church affords to the forces making for 
social righteousness the unsafest possible lead- 
ership. Notwithstanding our persistent blink- 
ing of the fact, and our evasion of the moral 
responsibility it puts upon us, money has more 
influence than Jesus upon the ecclesiastical 
attitude toward the problem of economic equal- 
ity and freedom. Any leadership the church 
would now put forward would be chiefly inter- 
ested in keeping the social change bounded by 
the interests of mammon, and in preventing 
from accomplishing the actual social ideal of 
Jesus. It would thus practise a vast deceit 
upon the people, and the revolution of vio- 



ECONOMICS AND RELIGION. 83 

lence would then follow. In any safe social 
leadership of the church, money and houses, 
lands and railways, must bring on the moral 
agony of its preparation. 

It is time, if the high time be not already 
past, that judgment begin at the house of 
God. If ever the religious needed to be told, 
in all the plainness of speech which the love 
of righteousness can conceive, that they can- 
not serve God and mammon, nor be both 
pious and covetous, and follow Christ while 
upholding an evil order, they need to be told 
this now. Like Jacob of old, we, the church, 
need to come to Jabbok ford, separating 
ourselves from the wealth that holds us in 
bondage all the harder that we feel it not, 
regarding no more our success in economic 
cheating and stealing as a mark of a spe- 
cially favoring Providence, making restitution 
to the sons of Esau we have robbed, pursu- 
ing no longer a religion not the righteous- 
ness of God in human relations, that God 
may wrestle with us in all the power of the 
common interests of man, and then we may 



84 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

come forth a new church with a new name, 
with a moral glory that shall bring the worn 
and waiting multitudes rejoicing to our doors, 
to be led into the social Israel of organized 
love. 



III. 

THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. 

I Kings xix. 13-18. 



Doubting Thomas and loving John, 
Behind the others walking on : — 

" Tell me now, John, dare you be 
One of the minority? 
To be lonely in your thought, 
Never visited nor sought. 
Shunned with secret shrug, to go 
Thro' the world esteemed its foe ; 
To be singled out and hissed, 
Pointed at as one unblessed, 
Warred against in whispers faint, 
Lest the children catch a taint ; 
To bear off your titles well, — 
Heretic and infidel? 
If you dare, come now with me, 
Fearless, confident, and free. 

" Thomas, do you dare to be 
Of the great majority? 
To be only, as the rest. 
With heaven's common comforts blessed; 
To accept in humble part 
Truth that shines on every heart ; 
Never to be set on high. 
Where the envious curses fly; 
Never name or fame to find, 
Still outstripped in soul and mind; 
To be hid, unless to God, 
As one grass-blade in the sod, 
Underfoot with millions trod? 
If you dare, come with us, be 
Lost in love's great unity." 

Edward Rowland Sill, in *^ Poems." 

Bernard never once seems conscious of his power, never appeals to 
his authority, never approaches to a command. He appeals to no sanc- 
tion but their common faith ; implores instead of threatens ; bewails 
rather than rebukes. When he complains of a sin, he is the fellow-suf- 
ferer with the sinner; when he claims an act of justice, it is by appeal- 
ing to the honour and duty of the wrongdoer. Whether he addresses 
pope, prince, or penitent, it is as one who is driven to implore, but who 
is utterly unworthy to command. Thus, from first to last, there is no 
trace of dictation, no consciousness of self, of any assumption of a right, 
no pride, anger, or rigour — there is nothing but the spontaneous outburst 
of a soul, which the sight of evil humiliates and hurts. — Frederic 
Harrison, in essay on " Bernard of Clairvaux," in *' The Choice of 
Books.'* 



III. 

THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL 
FAITH. 

And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said. What doest 
thou here, EUjah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the 
Lord, the God of hosts ; for the children of Israel have forsaken thy 
covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the 
sword ; and I, even I only, am left ; and they seek my life, to take it 
away. And the Lord said unto him. Go, return on thy way to the 
wilderness of Damascus ; and when thou comest, thou shalt anoint 
Hazael to be king over Syria; and Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt 
thou anoint to be king over Israel ; and Ehsha the son of Shaphat of 
Abel-meholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. And it 
shall come to pass, that him that escapeth from the sword of Hazael 
shall Jehu slay ; and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall 
Elisha slay. Yet will I leave me seven thousand in Israel, all the 
knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which 
hath not kissed him. — i Kings xix. 13-18. 

History records no braver faith than that of 
Elijah the prophet. Yet there came a time 
when Elijah despaired; when faith surrendered 
to disappointment, and the prophet would die 
with his work undone. 

Through long years, in desert walks and 
87 



88 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

mountain haunts, he had brooded over the sins 
of the people, preparing to work with God for 
their reformation. To get the attention of the 
nation, God had sent a famine upon the land. 
Three years more the prophet had waited in 
his hiding-place for the famine to do its work. 
The time came at last to break his silence and 
relieve the people's distress. '^ Go shew thy- 
self unto Ahab,'' the Lord commanded, ^^and I 
will send rain upon the earth." Elijah obeyed. 
Surely now, he thought, the king and the king- 
dom would repent and turn to the living God. 
The prophet arranged for a startling and 
phenomenal display of the Lord's wrath against 
the idolatry that had become both the state and 
the popular religion. He gathered the apos- 
tate people, with their false prophets, to Mount 
Carmel. After the long exhibition of the im- 
potence of the heathen priests, there came 
the fire that consumed their altars. Under the 
excitement of the great occasion the people 
rose up and slew the false prophets, in obedi- 
ence to Elijah's command. While they then 
refreshed themselves with food and drink, the 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 89 

reformer went to the top of the mount and 
prayed for rain. The rain came, and king 
with subjects hastened to shelter. Before the 
king's chariot, through the night and the storm, 
Elijah ran to the royal city of Jezreel, in the 
strength of the great hope that now wrought 
in his soul. He expected the reformation be- 
gun at Carmel to spread immediately through 
the whole kingdom ; Israel would now en- 
throne the worship of obedience to the living 
God as the religion of the nation. 

But on arriving at the capital city, he was 
met with a message from Queen Jezebel, an- 
nouncing that she had doomed him to the same 
fate he had brought upon the official prophets. 
The queen was the king's evil genius, whom 
the people feared more than the king. She 
was Elijah's bitterest foe, and virtue's worst 
enemy. If she was decided on the reformer's 
death, in the face of all that had taken place 
on Mount Carmel, after the awful day's work, 
with the bloody judgment upon the priests 
of the idolatry which the queen had herself 
largely introduced, then he must have lived 



go SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES 

and wrought for naught. If the forces of the 
state could be instantly turned against the 
living God, in the face of the commanding 
conclusion of the long, sad famine, then the 
national reformation was defeated at the out- 
set. The hopes of the morning died away in 
a discouragement too great to bear. He fled 
into the wilderness, lay down under a juniper- 
tree, and slept in physical and nervous exhaus- 
tion, having requested of the Lord that he 
might die. 

But in no such time and manner did the 
Lord intend to close the strong prophet^s 
career. A messenger came and ministered 
food, in the strength of which, with the heat 
of his soul, Elijah travelled forty days and 
nights, coming to Mount Horeb, where he 
lodged in a cave. The word of the Lord 
came, inquiring why he was there, calling 
him to the strictest examination of himself, 
causing a purer knowledge and hold of the 
forces with which he had to work, and send- 
ing him back to finish the many things left 
for him yet to do. Bad as the nation was, 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 9 1 

its condition was not so hopeless as Elijah's 
despondency told him. There were yet seven 
thousand who would not bow the knee to 
Baal. Out of public view, peacefully follow- 
ing the plough in the valleys, quietly trimming 
their vines on the hillsides, perhaps ignorant 
of the crisis they were in the midst of, were 
men and the fathers of men who would keep 
alive the truth, through apostasy and corrup- 
tion, to be borne on from generation to gen- 
eration, deepening and widening in each, till 
the Messias should come and light the nations 
to God. Flowing in these humble and un- 
noticed servants of the Lord were streams 
of rich manly life-blood, yet to beat strong in 
the hearts of noble warriors, brave prophets, 
and great apostles. Elisha was there among 
them, unknowingly preparing his spirit to con- 
tinue the work Elijah had begun, and link 
him with a long line of glorious prophets to 
come. Great potentialities of righteousness 
remained in Israel. The results of Elijah's 
labors were profounder than his provincial 
dreams, and to be finished vaster than the 



92 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

plan of his thought. His heroic faith was 
yet, through a disgraced and scattered people, 
to be fruitful in a righteousness that would 
become universal, making the nations of the 
world one kingdom of God. 

The fact that there was more good in 
Israel than he saw was Elijah's call to fuller 
service, and not to silence and moral ease. 
Go back to your work, was the substance of 
the divine command. The unseen good was 
his obligation to be all the more industrious 
in preparing for the overthrow of the visible 
evil. He dare not despair because of the 
enormity of the nation's sins, nor yet form a 
selfish estimate of popular virtue that might 
excuse him from moral responsibility. Be- 
cause of the seeming failure of his hard 
reform against intrenched and defiant wrong, 
he was not to spend his time henceforth 
exaggerating and flattering little goodnesses. 
He would have betrayed the hope which God 
had given him by being any less the virile and 
uncompromising man of effort than he had 
been before his disappointment. He had a 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. 93 

right to hope only as he worked with God ; 
and he could only work righteousness as he 
hoped with God. 

Elijah's disturbance of the peace of Israel 
seemed just as unreasonable as the prophetic 
warnings of all ages seem to the people to 
whom they are immediately spoken. All 
things together considered, notwithstanding 
the famine, the kingdom was enjoying a high 
degree of material prosperity. King Ahab 
was not the mental weakling he is commonly 
supposed to be. Other strong men after him 
have been dominated to their ruin by the 
beauty and wilfulness of a woman. Ahab 
was a soldier and a statesman, with a forceful 
courage and a large grasp of affairs. He was 
a builder of cities, a promoter of commerce, 
and a successful diplomat. Under his reign 
the kingdom was prosperous at home, and 
respected abroad. What was all Elijah's fuss 
about 1 Simply this, that the people were 
mistaking certain forms of political and ma- 
terial aggrandizement for national progress, 
and had therefore become materialistic in 



94 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

their worship ; it was logical that they should 
adopt a religion of physical forces. 

Elijah's seeming failure, with his bitter dis- 
appointment, resulted from the individualism of 
his effort. He mistook unrealized potencies of 
the people for impotence, and did not appre- 
hend the perfectness of the imperfect when 
used as social instruments. He stood alone, 
when he ought not to have stood alone ; he 
should have known, and in some measure have 
organized, the possibilities for righteousness in 
the seven thousand faithful. He could work 
for man, but not with man ; hence his work 
was rather for God than with God. He could 
not understand that divine opportunism by 
which God organizes all things, including evil, 
for righteousness. He did not know that when 
God cannot get what he wants he always 
takes what he can get. Elijah could die for 
righteousness' sake ; but to live for right's 
sake in the midst of wrong, to be the divine 
incarnation and the living sacrifice, was more 
than he could bear. He could rise to the 
heroism of destroying wrong, but had not 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. 95 

learned the vicariousness of healing wrong 
and converting it into right. He could un- 
derstand the judgment of destruction, and of 
instantaneous and arbitrary setting up of 
right; but he did not yet understand the 
judgment of redemption. The lesson of Eli- 
jah's disappointment is that individual effort 
must be led by social faith ; that faith in God 
will fail unless it be also a faith in the people. 
He seems somewhat to have learned the les- 
son, and to have put it into practice in anoint- 
ing other chosen instruments to succeed him 
in his work; also in establishing his school 
of prophets, which school was not a theo- 
logical seminary, but a centre of training for 
social agitation and political disturbance. 

But the loneliness and mysticism that al- 
ways mark the prophet are not strange when 
viewed in the light of his calling. The life 
that enters the fullest sacrifice of most fruit- 
ful service usually seems to the unseeing 
powers that be in its times, and to itself 
when nights of agony come on, to be either 
a foolish or wicked waste. Every prophet 



96 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

appears anachronistic to his age, which can see 
no sense in his being or speaking. He sees 
the march of nearing judgments, and by them 
interprets the meanings and issues of the 
movements in which the present is caught, 
while a great divine impulse he neither dares 
nor can suppress commands him to speak his 
truth to deaf ears, show his visions to blind 
eyes. There is the sound of swift approach- 
ing crises in his soul, and he grows weary 
with the weight of messages men heed but 
to misread. A nation's sins become his indi- 
vidual shame, the wrongs of the oppressed 
are his burden, and human destiny is alike 
his pain and joy. He is vicarious to lift his 
brothers by the power of his own ideals; 
knowing himself to be the brother of men in 
sin, he would make them his brothers in faith 
and effort. He is compelled to part ways 
with opinions he respects and characters he 
reveres ; with those whose fellowship he loves 
and whose kindnesses he has shared, in order 
to be true to the hope in him which seems 
hopelessness to the world. In keeping faith 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 97 

with himself, with the ideas and forces that 
commission and empower his life, he comes 
into square conflict with those the existing 
order calls its best, who are also highly sat- 
isfied with the world's opinion. Above all 
others he is bent upon the peace which jus- 
tice alone can procure, and yet is regarded as 
the disturber of the peace of the righteous 
and orderly of his day. He is supremely an 
optimist, believing better things for . his fel- 
lows than they dream of for themselves, and 
yet is set down as a brooding pessimist by 
those who contemplate the existing order with 
what a Scotch physician calls ^'that hideous 
foul easiness." An evangelist of mercy, he 
is known as a messenger of ill-omen and of 
wrath. He is sometimes wholly misunderstood 
by his friends, and most clearly understood by 
his enemies. 

Nor can he wait for what our scientific con- 
ceit would call an exactness of statement. 
Napoleon HI. is reputed to have once said that 
nothing lies like the truth ; which saying is 
true. ** Truth is as much greater than accu- 



98 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

racy as poetry is greater than proof-reading/* 
says Dr. John P. Coyle. There is an accuracy 
of statement which wholly belies the situation, 
while there is a divine exaggeration that is 
truer than the truth. The physician who 
would dwell on the healthy condition of a 
patient's hand, while the patient is just about 
dying from disease of the heart, is lying 
through the use of the truth. The politician 
who glorifies the deeds of the fathers, and 
accurately displays the great gains of the past 
generation, while the whole nation is diseased 
with political corruption, is a hypocrite and a 
traitor. The preacher who arouses himself 
and hearers with gains in church moneys and 
members, truthfully presenting certain facts of 
religious progress, with the increase of the 
righteous in the church, while the church in 
its institutional and authoritative attitude is 
at once blind and antagonistic to the cry and 
movement of the peoples for justice, is a false 
prophet and a liar. There are times when the 
most fatal falsehood is the utterance of what 
is strictly true. Jesus repeatedly and deliber- 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 99 

ately turned away those who were kindly and 
infiuentially disposed toward him, because of 
statements which, under the same circum- 
stances, would seem to us untruthful and in- 
tolerable. The prophet cannot wait to put 
into order a system of social, political, and 
religious doctrine. He must leave many 
things true in themselves unsaid, because 
they would be untrue and delusive in the 
setting of the immediate crisis. Our notion 
that a man must present truth full rounded, 
so that right may be stated satisfactorily to 
wrong, and sacrifice presented agreeably to po- 
litical and religious selfishness, would condemn 
and leave out of the realm of progress both 
Jesus and the apostles, with all the prophets 
both before and since their coming. What we 
conceive to be the full-rounded man has too 
often been of little use to progress, except to 
serve as ballast. No prophet has ever been 
reasonable or truthful to the judicious and rep- 
resentative minds of religion and state. The 
prophet's mission requires him to use the truth, 
not as an orb, but as a sword, He cannot blink 



lOO SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

the inevitable mortal antagonism of the vested 
interests of every sort in the existing order. 
Nor can he regard that chronic fright of origi- 
nality so characteristic of mere religion, or that 
morbid nervousness of conservatism at every 
sign of growth. The preparers of the way of 
progress, the initiators of effort, are always 
men become the living incarnations of an idea ; 
they are voices crying the way. With such 
God makes straight the path for the coming 
of the righteous society. By the moral daring 
of such adventurers the kingdom of our God 
is pioneered. '' There is no more sublime 
spectacle, — " says Victor Hugo, '' mankind's 
deliverance from above ; the potentates put to 
flight by the dreamers ; the prophet crushing 
the hero ; the sweeping away of violence by 
thought." 

But the prophet mode of progress is not the 
perfect mode ; and there is a better way of 
making history than the great man way. One 
human note is as ultimately necessary as 
another for the harmony of God's organ of 
humanity. There is coming a glad and tri- 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH lOI 

umphant time when the kingdom will need no 
voices crying its way ; though this does not 
mean that no man will be exceptional or great, 
but that all will be exceptional and great. The 
unity of life in an unbroken harmony of prog- 
ress that shall be nothing else than God in us 
and we his people, the whole human life thus 
becoming the Immanuel, is the end for which 
God works and inspires. 

*'For these things tend still upward, progress is 
The law of life, man is not Man as yet. 
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, 
While only here and there a star dispels 
The darkness, here and there a towering mind 
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host 
Is out at once to the despair of night. 
When all mankind alike is perfected. 
Equal in full-blown powers — then, not till then, 
say, begins man's general infancy." ^ 

The leadership of the faith of the people 
is slowly but gloriously disclosing itself as the 
better way of progress. It was something of 
this that Elijah dimly saw and obeyed, after 
Mount Carmel, the juniper-tree, and Horeb. 

1 " Paracelsus," Robert Browning. 



102 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

This was distinctly the ideal of Jesus' kingdom 
of God. He that is least in the kingdom of 
heaven is greater than John the Baptist, though 
there be no greater personality born of women. 
Though none be so primarily necessary as 
the prophet, the least servant in the right- 
eous society, the least apostle of its facts and 
forces, does a more constructive work. One 
thing greater than leadership is the greatness 
of being loyal to it, and of confessing it with- 
out shame, and with gladness. 

Nor is the cataclysmal method of race de- 
velopment the substantial or final method. 
Though it has often taken generations of war 
and common suffering to teach man the fact, 
and give him the discipline, of a single idea, 
yet we shall not always need to learn through 
suffering ; not when we are able to learn other- 
wise. Not always will the noon glare of ma- 
terially splendid civilizations blind the eyes of 
institutions and authorities to the judgments 
that are upon them ; the harvest sword of God 
will not swing in the human sky unseen save 
by the prophet. The unceasing change of 



THE LEADERSHIP OE SOCIAL FAITH IO3 

growth will not forever be an intensifying 
strain and pain, while it ought to be an in- 
creasing harmony. The consummations of the 
ages, the harvest judgments that are epochally 
ending and creating anew the world, will yet 
come and go without noise and woe. The tem- 
ple of the righteous society will at last arise 
without the sound of laborious toil, and with 
the work that is the growth and melody of love. 
The value of revolutions to progress has 
been historically overestimated ; they have ac- 
complished less in reality than is apparent. 
I would not underestimate their social value, 
nor question their historical necessity. But 
they have put history backward as well as 
forward ; they are always pulling up the wheat 
along with the tares in their violence. The 
Jewish revolt that came to an end under Titus, 
though a revolt against oppression without 
conscience or pity, is here significant. If the 
nation had done as Jesus wanted it to do, at- 
tending to social righteousness in itself, and 
leaving Rome to plunder without resistance, 
when the Roman fabric fell, because of its own 



I04 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

corruption and weakness, Jerusalem might 
have risen the actual rock and desire of the na- 
tions. Jesus must have brooded long and deep 
over the subject of revolutions. With the 
profoundest sympathy for the people whose 
wrongs drove them to revolt, his attitude against 
them, his estimate of their social failure, was 
profoundly philosophic. His doctrine of non- 
resistance was no pietism, but was the keenest 
and clearest apprehension of the law of social 
growth ; he spoke not as a religionist, but as 
the profoundest social philosopher. If we knew 
how to let evil alone in the right way, it would 
come to an end. When we discover how to be 
opportune without compromising our ideals to 
the slightest shade, how to be expedient with- 
out being morally sceptic, we will cease to resist 
evil, and attend strictly to righteousness, with 
the final discovery that there is no evil to 
attend to, and that the thing we call the devil 
has ceased to be. 

There is always more of good in the com- 
mon life than appears on the social surface. 
While evil is assertive, and its organizations 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. I05 

fall with cataclysmal noise, the good evolves 
from potentiality into the activity of conscious 
service more as the lily of the field. Revo- 
lutions at best but make way for evolution, 
as the thunderings and lightnings clear the 
atmosphere, while the rain and noiseless sun- 
light paint the beauty of the earth, and call 
forth its fruits. The confusion and violence 
must be met and subdued to order, but with 
the listening remembrance that the voice of 
the Lord is still and small, spoken in the 
faithfulness of the toiling thousands who serve 
without reference to Baal or mammon. Right- 
eousness moves most quietly, while the king- 
dom comes with surest might and widest 
fulness. May not Frederick Froebel, the ob- 
scure and persecuted German teacher, by his 
kindergarten method and philosophy of edu- 
cation, ultimately have done more to make 
actual and permanent human history than any 
of the great military conquerors t While to 
our short and clouded vision the work of God 
seems slow, and we cry aloud for God to 
arise and shake terribly the earth, lest wicked 



I06 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

men prevail, the spirit of right broods deep 
resolve in the common life and its prophets, 
creating unseen to us a new earth. When 
redemption seems hardly to prove itself a 
fact, and we mourn at the tombs of slain 
hopes, away beyond our faith the truth we 
thought ours is risen in the responsive faith 
of the peoples, leading them in gladness to 
liberty. 

Much of the real and seeming evil of 
human life is moral ignorance, rather than 
deliberate disobedience. Countless human 
lives hunger for righteousness who know not 
where to find living pasture. Multitudes, 
both within and without the churches, are 
as sheep without shepherds, and yet are not 
only willing, but eager, to be led by shepherds 
righteous and fearless according to the ideal 
of Jesus. More feet than we can number, 
both of the rich and the poor, are scorched 
and bleeding in the search for some rock of 
truth on which to stand amidst the unrest 
and disorder. There is to-day enough of the 
social sense potential in human organism to 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 10/ 

render practicable the command that no one 
be anxious for the morrow. But civilization 
has so long been the power of the strong to 
exploit the weak, industry so long a war be- 
tween the selfish for the spoil of the people's 
toil, organized religion so long the selfish ap- 
peal of institutionalism to the selfish inter- 
ests of the soul, that the people know not yet 
how to rise into the liberty of the sons of 
God. 

This moral ignorance is somewhere bla- 
mable ; somewhere the ignorance of faithless- 
ness to the social trust. John, the hostler 
of *' Black Beauty," speaks sound wisdom 
about ignorance. *^ Only ignorance ! only ig- 
norance ! how can you talk about only igno- 
rance 1 Don't you know that it is the worst 
thing in the world, next to wickedness } — and 
which does the most mischief Heaven only 
knows." To this wisdom of the hostler ought 
to be added the wisdom of Jesus, that moral 
ignorance is wickedness. Farther back, might 
be taken the complaint of the prophet who 
was one of the formative influences of Jesus' 



I08 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

life. Isaiah's burden, delivered to the priests 
and politicians of Jerusalem, was the moral 
ignorance they had wrought in the people. 
The people would not know and consider the 
right in distinction from wrong ; they refused 
to be ethically intelligent. Their ignorance of 
the right had come from the shepherds un- 
consciously growing into the mere hirelings 
of interests and parties. The tragedy of the 
human evolution has not been in the unwill- 
ingness of the common life to grow. God's 
trouble has never been with the peoples, if 
he could only find shepherds who would not 
become the hirelings of religious or political 
parties, of institutional or personal ambition 
to monopolize righteousness. The sins of 
the people are ever the fruitful result of the 
moral ignorance sown in the common life 
by the selfish design or neglect of faithless 
religious or political officials. Progress rises 
through the successive ridding of the people 
of merely official leaders, who prey upon the 
common strength and beat back the common 
freedom, and the raising up of leaders who 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH IO9 

are incarnations of the common life, its as- 
pirations and efforts. 

This is the chief social value of what we 
call great crises. As some crisis in the life of 
a man discloses nobilities in him that surprise 
his friends, and loyalties in his friends that 
surprise him, so a national crisis calls master- 
minded statesmen from among the people, 
with commanders of armies and prophet poets 
from the toiling ranks ; the nation suddenly 
finds itself rich in heroes of the common 
life. '^ There is," says Dr. Garth Wilkin- 
son, the Scotch physician from whom I have 
already quoted, *^ a high law of order, of in- 
stant organization, which will inevitably range 
God's free men in his battalions, without pre- 
concert, or coat cut to an external pattern." 

The democracy of progress, calling for the 
profoundest social faith, is a fact of history 
writ large, but as yet read small. The high 
tides of the unceasing and increasing move- 
ment of righteousness bear into wide view 
leaders from the centres of power or sources 
of culture ; but these leaders have not been 



no SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

of the culture or power from whence they 
came. The spoiling of the Egyptians is an 
apt expression here. Moses and Paul, Lu- 
ther and Mazzini, bring from the schools the 
spoils of learning, with the arts of power 
from power's centres ; but their real power 
and inspiration, with the actual education and 
forces of their life, come from the people. 
The literatures which the schools dissect and 
analyze, building up rival parties of learning, 
have been chiefly the creation of great moral 
passions and social efforts of the common 
life ; which passions in their rise were un- 
known by the schools, and which efforts were 
by them despised. The church always credits 
itself with the glory of the saints and proph- 
ets, with the efforts for righteousness they 
have led ; but that is after they have been 
stoned, outlawed, and slain by the church, 
and have risen from the dead, glorified in 
the triumphant faith of the people. Institu- 
tionalized power, political, religious, and scho- 
lastic, has been historic in its opposition to 
progress ; while the human value of mere 



THE LEADERSHIP OE SOCIAL EAITH. 1 1 1 

scholarship is immeasurably overestimated, 
the social value of institutions greatly mis- 
understood. '*It is the universities," says 
Henry D. Lloyd, ''that are in need of culture, 
— of the culture of the workingmen in hard- 
ship, and equality, and sacrifice/' Likewise, 
there is an immeasurable underestimation of 
the social value and creative power of the 
mere common feeling of the people after jus- 
tice. The social faith of the peoples, the 
commonalty of their moral feeling, has been 
the power of God unto progress ; while the 
powers that be, and the students, are busy 
here and there, doing the works of their im- 
aginations, believing not the word of God in 
the people, although the true end of institu- 
tions is to hear and execute this word. 

The whole movement of the Protestant 
Reformation had in each nation a certain 
ground of social hope in the common peo- 
ple, which has been obscured by succeed- 
ing theological controversies. The Reforma- 
tion of Wyckliffe was largely an effort of 
the English people for the justice they could 



112 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

not get from feudal lords so long as they 
were supported by the priesthood.^ The 
Lollards were mainly persecuted and put to 
death for reasons that were not at all theo- 
logical, or even religious in the current sense 
of that word, but for causes that were dis- 
tinctly economic ; they were animated by a 
passion for social justice, and were known 
as the anarchists and destroyers of political 
order in their day. The Reformation in 
France seized Calvin by the force of its need, 
providentially compelling him to be its cham- 
pion, and had in it the hope of political free- 
dom. Luther was the articulation, rather 
than the cause, of the German Reformation, 
which had its rise and strength in the Ger- 
man peasantry. ^ 

Jesus based his claim to Jewish recognition 
on the fact that he was a development of the 
people. He was always trying to show his 
organic relation to the national and social evo- 
lution and to the universal preparation. He 

1 " History of the English People," John Richard Green, vol. ii., 
chap. iii. 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. II3 

was the flower of the fulness of his times ; not 
brought forth as some magical or supernatural 
being, but as the perfect work and glory of the 
common forces at work in human life. Dr. 
Edwin Hatch calls studious attention to the 
great revival of morals, the wide and deep 
effort toward righteousness, issuing from the 
Stoics, which had prepared the Graeco-Roman 
for Jesus' coming.^ It is as unfair in church 
historians to point to the Roman and the 
Greek cities as a true picture of the best that 
pagan religion could do for the people, as it 
would be for a Buddhist to point to the slums 
of London and New York as the natural fruit 
of Jesus' teaching. Whether we are conscious 
of the cause or not, it is because their com- 
mon life found in him at his coming, and has 
increasingly found in him since, its personal 
incarnation and objective revelation, that the 
people pray to the Father in the terms of 
Jesus. Man prays in Jesus' name because 
Jesus is the expression of man's conscious 

1 " The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian 
Church," Lecture VI. 



114 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

manhood, as yet but potential and unrealized. 
The people believe in Jesus because Jesus 
believed in the people. Human life will com- 
mit itself finally to this Son of God because 
he is the Son of man, bone of our bone, flesh 
of our flesh, the glory and ascension of our 
common effort. God became the incarnation 
of man in Jesus, as well as man the incarna- 
tion of God ; God always has to become man 
before he can work and rise with man. The 
social revelation of the incarnation of God in 
the Son of man, and in history, is the imme- 
diately pertinent lesson of this the social hour. 
To-day society is under deep conviction of 
sin, conscious of a corruption which mere re- 
form cannot heal, sensible of a guilt which 
neither revolution nor legislation can bear 
away. Society is also asking what it shall do 
to be saved, day by day convinced that it has 
as yet no organized power by which to accom- 
plish the social salvation. But who, or what, 
shall deliver society from its weight of sin and 
guilt ; from the strain and distress that baffle 
the wisest and make the bravest doubtful ; 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH. 1 1 5 

from the social shame that overwhelms, and 
the social ruin that impends ? 

The times are prolific of social solvents. 
Many of the programmes proposed for the evo- 
lution of social knowledge and order from the 
present ignorance and confusion are good, so 
far as they comprehend the problem of society. 
All of them, even the wildest social schemes 
proposed, are potential with the elements of 
the power that will yet unify all elements and 
forces in a social regeneration. But not even 
the best programmes satisfy our various inter- 
ests, commercial, scientific, and theological. 

We are asking for men who will outline for 
us the new social system ; for a science which 
shall detail for us the full particulars of a new 
social organization. We wait for some one to 
offer us a complete programme of social re- 
form, and point out to us each step in the 
fulfilment of the programme, before we pro- 
ceed to right our social wrongs, or believe in 
the nearness of a juster society. We would 
know by what paths we are to move, before 
we set out toward a better civilization, before 



Il6 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

we commit ourselves to a social ideal. We im- 
agine we are willing to walk by sight ; but we 
are certain that the safety of society depends 
upon our treating as offenders any who would 
have us walk by faith. As a bright friend of 
mine says, ^^ First move the ship, then steer;" 
but we are exhausting ourselves in trying to 
steer social progress without moving it ; that 
is, to make progress that shall not be change. 

"But if we are to learn the future of soci- 
ety, and work with the social forces that are 
to prevail, we must learn from the feeling of 
the common life, which has more to give us 
than we to give it, and must become its liv- 
ing incarnations. From all sorts of respecta- 
bility, good Lord, deliver us, may have to be 
added to the prayer of progress. The uni- 
versal social crisis we face calls those of us 
who would work with these forces to the full- 
est apprehension of the leadership of social 
faith. The common life is eager and adven- 
turous as never before with the messianic 
forces that are to make the righteous soci- 
ety. President Eliot has a touching expres- 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 11/ 

sion about '*the uninformed public opinion of 
the west." As a matter of reality, the some- 
what undeformed common opinion of the west, 
notwithstanding all that may seem wild and 
vague, is a surer social prophecy than any 
voice that the university has yet raised. The 
social talk in the rude mining town, in the 
railway-construction camp, on the mortgaged 
farms of the Dakotas, will afford a clearer 
view of the social future of our nation than 
can be seen from the point occupied by eco- 
nomic or social science. The authority of 
human life is spoken even in the angry de- 
mand of the mob for justice, and the tri- 
umphant persistence of moral forces can be 
heard in the rude appeal of the demagogue 
and the agitator. The glory of God is shin- 
ing everywhere in the social expectancy and 
earnestness of human faces. The better civ- 
ilization will be wrought at last by the social 
feeling of the people, by their natural and 
untutored sense of divine justice, without re- 
gard to those of us seeking a science of soci- 
ety, and very likely in ignorance of our having 



Il8 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

existed. The social feeling of the common 
life is always a more intelligent and com- 
manding guide than all the wisdom of politi- 
cal and social philosophers. The voice of the 
people is in truth the voice of God, and the 
feeling of the people the pulse of progress. 
The chief value of what we may get from 
the schools, from the most accurate social 
sciences, from the most careful facts that ex- 
pert observers may gather, is the art they 
may give us to interpret the voice of God 
in the people. Whatever the simple feeling 
for justice in the common life says ought to 
be is the authoritative word of what will be, 
notwithstanding the conservatism of our in- 
teresting sciences and vested interests. This 
word must be our teacher, if we are to be 
scientific in any true sense, or are to stand 
before men as reformers who speak with the 
authority of the living God. 

Some of us cry unto God to send us men 
like unto the old prophet reformers of the 
Hebrews. But that God spake to the He- 
brew people at certain times, in a certain 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH II9 

manner, is no sign that God will ever again 
speak in like manner to other nations. His- 
tory never repeats itself. God needs no more 
Elijahs or Jeremiahs. God wants not proph- 
ets, nor the sons of prophets, but men, — di- 
vinely human men, — moving in the normal 
order and common experiences, of human re- 
lations ; men without ill balances, or even 
what Carlyle would call righteous eccentrici- 
ties. It is not the spirit of Elijah or John 
the Baptist that shall now go before the 
face of the Lord to prepare the way of his 
coming in a new order of things, but a 
more whole and human spirit. The He- 
brew spirit has done its work, — a good 
work, but, historically, a finished work, not 
to be done again. We also cry for a new 
Luther, a Savonarola ; we would call into res- 
urrection the spent spirit of the Protestant 
Reformation, the Puritan Revolution, or the 
early spirit of the American movement for 
the abolition of slavery. But the spirits of 
these have done their work, and not their 
work is needed now. A Luther would be a 



i20 SOCIAL MEANINGS OP EXPERIENCES. 

calamity, a Savonarola an added burden, to 
the forces at work in the social regeneration. 
The spirit that gave national salvation and 
Cromwell to England would now put history 
backward. The spirit that abolished slavery 
would not be able to bring forth order from 
amidst present social conditions. The reform- 
ers of history have all done the work of God 
in their way and time ; they have been di- 
vinely chosen men, and have followed divinely 
chosen methods. But God neither wants, nor 
will there be, a social reformation, but some- 
thing deeper, more enduring and diviner. The 
reformer might be animated by the loftiest en- 
thusiasm that reformation can inspire, but not 
be able to prepare the social way of the Lord, 
whatever good he might accomplish, however 
great his achievements and triumphs. 

They who look for the coming of the holy 
society will be compelled to choose between 
the way of Jesus and the way of any of the 
reformers who have given their life for the 
world. From the way of reformers the way 
of Jesus radically diverges. In the most 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 121 

fundamental sense, we cannot be a follower 
or disciple of any reformer or patriot and 
at the same time a follower and disciple of 
the Lord Christ. They who prepare the 
way of the new social kingdom will be 
quickening spirits, rather than political or 
religious reformers ; and through them the 
regeneration of society will proceed without 
observation, while the politically and reli- 
giously wise are mocking their impracticabil- 
ity. Though antagonized beyond all others, 
they will not be antagonists, but witnesses 
of the divine order that is slowly manifest- 
ing itself in the world-consciousness, and that 
has always been the foundation of the world's 
progress. They will be lights before whom 
the social darkness will retreat, almost with- 
out men's discerning that the darkness is pass- 
ing. And when the Christ order of human 
relations appears, men will wonder by what 
means it has come. 

By the social faith of the people we shall 
have to move out of the old and into the 
new order at last. No new social system 



122 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

will be accurately outlined, no programme 
completed, by which we may advance with the 
successive steps in view. Society will not be 
saved by statistics, and will not act according 
to the fictions of abstract economics. The 
new civilization will not be the creation of 
the merely intellectual forces at work upon 
a science of social origins, phenomena, and 
diseases. Nor will it be made by political 
hammer and saw. It will be the political out- 
growth of a religious evolution of the com- 
mon life. Its foundations are descending 
silently out of heaven from God; and its ma- 
sonry will rise without noise amidst the social 
confusion and possible violence, — the work of 
unseen hands, the creation of spiritual forces. 
The leadership of social faith requires of 
us the fullest and most generous recogni- 
tion of the values of each other's works and 
words ; requires that we seek to accredit all 
our progresses to the common life, keeping 
ourselves as individuals, and our systems of 
thought as well, out of sight. Not only must 
Elijah discover the good in the existing or- 



THE LEADERSHIP OF SOCIAL FAITH 1 23 

der, and be willing to work with his brothers 
from Elisha to Jehu, but the good in the ex- 
isting order must respond to the good in 
Elijah. If the best conservatism in existing 
institutions would consider its need of Eli- 
jah's singleness of vision, its need of that 
ideal of absolute right he cannot yield though 
it slay him, and would not suffer the powers 
that be to outlaw him as a vagabond, or 
threaten to sever his head from his body, 
Elijah might not so often despair in over- 
whelming conviction that conditions are even 
worse than he has seen. We are alike prone 
to judge of the value of each other's work 
by its immediate effect upon our own, judge 
of the value of each other's words by their 
bearing on our present plans. We each 
apply narrow, selfish, and individualistic meas- 
urements to the worth of each other's ef- 
forts for the righteous society. If another 
m^an works in a way that crosses our own 
work, or that seems to deny our cherished 
convictions, we therefore decide the man to 
be inexpedient or dangerous, when it may be 



124 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

we are each sounding distinct notes of the 
spirit that socializes and saves. Our unwill- 
ingness to suffer men to cast out devils in 
any other way than ours, or to cast out 
the particular devils we feel ourselves bet- 
ter fitted to cast out, is in itself a sure sign 
of our own social unfitness. When we who 
would prepare the way of his kingdom have 
faith enough in God to trust each other, 
to believe in the religious value of concep- 
tions that appear to contradict what we have 
learned and taught, to rejoice in the social 
value of efforts that seem to cross our own, 
to be not so fearful for the course of right- 
eousness outside ancient channels, then we 
will hear our teachings that now seem widely 
at variance becoming accordant notes of one 
psalm of progress, and human life will see in 
our efforts that now seem divergent a glow- 
ing prophecy of the blessed relations of the 
nearing heavenly society. 



IV. 

REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 

John xxi. 17. 



It frequently happens that repentant sinners become more holy and 
pleasing to God than those who have never fallen. There are a multitude 
of persons who go through life in a safe, uninteresting mediocrity. They 
have never been exposed to temptation ; they are not troubled with violent 
passions ; they have nothing to try them ; they have never attempted great 
things for the glory of God ; they have never been thrown upon the world ; 
they live at home in the bosom of their families or in quiet situations ; and 
in a certain sense they are innocent and upright. They have not profaned 
their baptismal robe in any remarkable way ; they have done nothing to 
frighten their conscience ; they have ever lived under a sense of religion, 
and done their immediate duties respectably. And, when their life is 
closed, people cannot help speaking well of them, as harmless, decent, 
correct persons, whom it is impossible to blame, impossible not to regret. 
Yet, after all, how different their lives from that described as a Christian's 
life in St. Paul's Epistles ! I do not mean different in regard to persecu- 
tions, wanderings, heroic efforts, and all that is striking and what is called 
romantic in the apostle's history ; but (if I must condense all I mean in 
one word) in regard to unselfishness. All the peculiarity of a Christian 
consists in his preferring God and his neighbor to self, — in self-denial for 
the sake of God and his brethren. — Joh7t Henry Newman^ in ''Sermons 
on Subjects of the Day." 

I HAVE lost everything and lost myself; and yet, O God, Thou hast 
kept my life's desire alive within me. Thou hast not blotted out before me 
the aim which has caused my sorrows, as Thou dost before so many thou- 
sands who ruin their own lives, but Thou hast preserved my work in spite 
of my errors. I was drawing near to my tomb in hopelessness, but Thou 
hast filled my evening with brightness, and softened the sorrows of my life. 
I am not worthy, Lord, of Thy compassion and trust. Thou alone hast had 
pity on the crushed worm ; Thou hast not broken the bruised reed, nor 
quenched the smoking flax, nor hast Thou ever averted thy face from the 
offering which, from my childhood, I have striven, but striven in vain, to 
bring to the outcasts of the world. — Henry Pestalozzi, in a written 
prayer. 

126 



IV. 
REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 

He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of John, lovest 
thou me? Peter v;as grieved because he said unto him the third 
time, Lovest thou me ? And he said unto him. Lord, thou knowest 
all things ; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, 
Feed my sheep. — John xxi. 17. 

The rally of a strong man's faith, after the 
moral shock of his unexpected fall into some 
deep sin, is the mightiest effort of God in a 
human life. By the power of such an effort 
Peter took his place as leader among the apos- 
tles, after he had denied his Lord, proved him- 
self falser than his eleven brethren, and brought 
upon himself something of the shame of Judas. 

Peter had not meant to sin ; his was no de- 
liberate falsehood, or thought-out abandonment 
of a course of life. But a man does not need 
to be a cool and calculative sinner to lose his 
moral balance in the moment of crisis ; even to 
have fair become foul, and foul become fair. 

127 



128 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

Strong passions know no moral mathematics, 
and are controlled only by affections and faiths 
stronger than themselves. Through long years 
some holy dream of a man's soul may be so 
selfishly cherished that, when suddenly facing 
either possible realization or probable defeat, it 
becomes a passion without thought or will, 
drawing the man's whole being into its con- 
cluding and uncaring leap. Then reason be- 
comes unreason ; while the hand of God seems 
to slacken the reins, and the soul discerns not 
between the flames that lure to death and the 
lights that shine for life. It was somewhat so 
with Peter. 

It is with the strongest gentleness that Jesus 
meets the impetuous and repentant apostle ; 
the gentleness which spares no humbling of 
pride, no restoring pain, that it may render 
Peter plastic for the divine mould. You have 
fallen, Peter, at the point where you thought 
yourself safest of all. You boasted of your 
greater faith, of a devotion which could not be 
tempted ; yet these your brethren have been 
truer than you. You were blindly obeying 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 29 

your self-will, when you thought yourself my 
closest follower. What think you of yourself 
now, Peter? Lovest thou me more than these? 
Peter this time makes no assertion of greater 
devotion, nor hints at any comparison of per- 
sonal values. He does not even use Jesus' 
word for the highest quality of personal and 
religious affection, but a word of weaker mean- 
ing, as a literal translation shows. Not only is 
the spirit of self-valuing gone, the shame of 
his failure will not let him confess the love he 
knows to be in his heart. He turns back the 
appeal to the divine appellant : Lord, you know 
whether I love you or not ; you know that I 
am at least fond of you ; look into my heart 
and see. But yet more must Peter be hum- 
bled, and that in the presence of his brethren. 
Thrice had he denied his Lord ; thrice must 
he anew confess him. The third time Jesus 
accepts the apostle's own word, and makes no 
reference to the other apostles. Are you sure, 
Peter, that you are even fond of me ? Then 
Peter was grieved at his Lord's moral probing 
and seeming persistence of distrust. But he 



130 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

makes no claims for himself. He simply casts 
himself into the arms of that unsparing mercy, 
that all-knowing love. Lord, my destiny is in 
your hands ; to you I commit myself for judg- 
ment and command ; you know all things ; you 
know that I am fond of you ; I have learned 
the lesson of my failure ; surely you do not 
believe I will fail again. 

Then, if your failure has freed you from the 
weakness and tyranny of self-will, and you 
now love me above yourself, realize your re- 
pentance in service ; vindicate your apostle- 
ship in sacrifice for the kingdom I have 
revealed and initiated. Feed my lambs, Peter ; 
strengthen my weak ones ; shepherd my sheep. 
When you were young you felt yourself 
strong, and you were self-reliant. You were 
borne about upon the impulses of your self- 
will. But it will be so with you no more. 
I have saved you from yourself ; and from 
the depths into which your passion of self- 
will plunged you, my spirit has lifted you 
up. Henceforth you are mine, Peter, re- 
deemed by the sacrifice of service, to which 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, I3I 

your life is henceforth committed. You are 
no more at your own disposal. The currents 
of redemptive providence will bear you in 
unseen ways you would not have chosen. 
And when you are old, others will bind you 
and lead you to death, as I have been led. 
You have nothing more to do with your 
destiny, save to accept its glory of sacrifice. 
Your times and seasons, your words and 
works, are appointed you of my Father, whom 
I have made known to you ; in his way I 
will lead you from now on. Idle no time in 
looking back ; waste no strength in faith- 
less remorse ; nor fear the future. Through 
our fellowship of suffering and triumph in 
redeeming human life, I will make your fail- 
ure and shame glorify both me as your Re- 
deemer and you as my redeemed one. The 
denial of self in behalf of your brothers, your 
continuous sacrifice upon the altar of human 
need, can alone vindicate your devotion, re- 
mit your sin, and make your broken career 
whole, with your repentance sure and glori- 
ous. 



132 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

Thus the first value of Peter's repentance, 
after his restoration, would be its value to 
others as a redemptive force. As the woman 
of Eden is promised salvation through the 
bearing of children, so Peter is promised an 
effectual repentance through the moral birth 
he shall give to other life than his ov/n. He 
who, being the leader of the apostolic fellow- 
ship, had sinned most deeply and repented 
most sorrowfully, would be the one to under- 
stand most sympathetically the dangers and 
needs of the sheep. The greatness of his 
sin would give him a sense of oneness with 
the weakest and worst of his brethren. His 
own failure would make him slow to condemn, 
and quick to serve. The farther he advanced 
from his sin, the more frightful it would ap- 
pear in the clearer light of purer years, and 
the stronger would be the gratitude compel- 
ling him to the Redeemer's service. The 
tradition of his rising every morning at the 
same hour at which he denied his Lord, and 
going alone to pray anew for forgiveness, 
whether true or not, is expressive of the 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 33 

heart and career of the apostle's after life. 
We are not surprised to find him the most 
passionate proclaimer of the need and fact 
of redemption. It was fitting that through 
great sufferings and daring adventures of 
faith, by brave deeds and fruitful words, and 
at last by most painful martyrdom, Peter 
should prove his devotion, and glorify the 
apostolic brotherhood. 

Peter's character being what it was, his 
disgrace was essential to his development 
and equipment. Not until terrible catastrophe 
had annihilated his selfish faith, and he had 
thus been brought very low, was he able to 
do his divinely appointed work in the divine 
way. God does not order evil that good may 
come, but he so organizes evil tendencies as 
to bring them to an end. The apostle's fail- 
ure was the revelation, and therefore the 
judgment and cure, of the evil persisting in 
his previous career. The fall of the man 
was also the fall of his sin. Being tried at 
his strongest, he found self a failure. Where 
he thought he of all others was safest, he 



134 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

fell the lowest, save one. Before this fall 
he had been pursuing the phantom of life, 
which is power for one's self ; now he laid 
hold of the reality, which is the service of 
one's brothers. He had been a man of ex- 
tremely generous impulses and very selfish 
principles, ready to serve in an individualistic 
way, but impatient of co-operation with his 
brothers in mutualism of effort. His unsocial 
individualism had led to his fall, and he 
reached repentance through a social process. 
The social realization of individual repentance 
is thus the distinct lesson of Peter's restora- 
tion to his apostleship and brotherhood. 

In the leadership of the past the personal 
repentance of certain strong characters has 
been the most effective social force of reli- 
gion. This is the characteristic of Hebrew 
and Christian religion. The Hebrew genius 
and aspiration have the one idea of redemp- 
tion ; and the gospel of Christ and the king- 
dom is the revelation and message of redemp- 
tion accomplished. Moses, David, and Isaiah 
are lifelong penitents, the consciousness of 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 35 

specific sins seeming to effect their most re- 
demptive deeds for the Hebrew people, and 
to be the organ of their most comprehensive 
visions of human perfection. From Paul to 
Augustine, from Luther to Finney, the sense 
of personal sin to be expiated, or of sin for- 
given, often making for deformity as well as 
righteousness, has impelled the most strenu- 
ous religious effort and service. The quick- 
ening messages of judgment and redemption 
have been best preached by men quick with 
the consciousness of having been redeemed. 
The great world-helpers have somehow, some- 
time, known themselves as great sinners, mov- 
ing through the flame of the pit, coming forth 
maimed for life, with right arms or right 
eyes consumed away. Upon his most re- 
sponsible errands God has sent men forever 
humbled by sin, made memorable by thorns 
of bitter regret ; men purified by suffering 
that would consume body or brain should 
they neglect to work out their salvation in 
vicarious service. 

Of course, the profoundest processes by 



136 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

which the greatest human values are made 
do not appear. All that is deepest and holi- 
est in the bravest and mightiest lives, all that 
is best and costliest, is felt but not seen. 
Their life is hid with Christ in God — hid 
both from themselves and the world. The 
world feels the power of the divinely pos- 
sessed and offered life ; the machinery of 
the world is safer because of the life's pres- 
ence ; but the world sees not the secret 
springs of its power. The world thrives on 
the worth and rejoices in the strength of 
strong, white souls ; but the mighty forces 
that move them, the deathless loves that in- 
thrall them, the divine visions that lead 
them, — all are hid from the world's eyes. 
The hopes of men are lifted by the revela- 
tion of some new truth; but the school in 
which the prophet learned the truth he 
speaks is hid away in the hills of God. The 
soul of the world rises upon the inspiration 
of great poetry ; but it reckons little that 
the genius of poetry is also the genius of 
suffering. The courage of the world leaps 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 37 

with the wine of an intensely consecrated 
life ; but it sees not the wine-press of anguish 
in which the feet of God have trodden out 
the wine. The world feels a new security 
in the presence and power of one who is 
manifestly a man of God ; but it catches 
only faint flashes of the hid fires that are 
consuming the dross. Thus the master influ- 
ences that mould the thought and history of 
the race are largely invisible. 

Even while we rejoice in our world re- 
demption by the sinless and therefore great- 
est sufferer, we know little of what Calvary 
meant ; the deep darkness of Gethsemane 
no eye but the Father's has ever pierced; 
the weight of the human woe that crushed 
out the cleansing blood of the Lamb, none 
but the infinite love knows. 

Could all these world-helpers, like the One, 
have come forth unblemished from the wil- 
derness of experience between innocence and 
virtue, that would have been good ; for that 
is our human destiny. But it is infinitely 
better to be tempted and fall, and then be 



138 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

redeemed and equipped for service, than 
never to have been morally proved and 
made. The redemptive value of untried in- 
nocence is simply that of the raindrop and the 
apple-blossom. It is the goodness achieved 
through tremendous moral processes which 
counts in the service that redeems. The old 
Peter was a crude and worthless man com- 
pared with Peter refined and restored. One 
hour of a redeemed life is worth more for 
God's human service than countless ages of 
a merely innocent life. The kingdom of 
heaven is not to come through the pleasant 
studies of intellectual butterflies of culture, 
or the delightful exhortations of religious 
connoisseurs, but by men to whom sin and 
redemption are the profoundest facts of 
knowledge and experience. The smallest 
fragment of a man saved from mortal con- 
flicts, purified in the heat of moral convul- 
sions, has a social worth which Adam could 
not have possessed by living in unproved 
innocence until now. No man is good for 
God's redemptive service, good for much in 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 39 

any sphere of human development, until he 
has met and triumphantly fought the battal- 
ions of wicked devices which the pov/ers of 
darkness marshal before the advance of every 
chosen soul — and every soul is chosen. Only 
give God a man, and he will pay any cost, 
or take any risk. A universe of material 
worlds is but as a grain of sand when valued 
with the man who images God's idea of hu- 
man life. 

Then the fearful failure of life is not in 
having sinned, but in never having given one's 
self to a positive righteousness, with its enthu- 
siasm for moral conquest. Not the blameless 
life, the faultless conduct, makes up the great 
human thing to be desired, but the passion for 
the increase of right. The career which cus- 
tomary religion and social judgment see to be 
worthy, and even spotless and exemplary, is 
often at best a mere negative, a moral cipher. 
Not the having done no wrong, but the having 
done right, is the end of living morality ; and 
right doing is always some form of social 
sacrifice. 



I40 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

Remarkable enough to our religious valua- 
tions, Jesus never condemned sinners as such ; 
he condemned only those who did not know 
themselves as sinners. This attitude he ex- 
pressed in the keen irony of the statement 
that he came not to call the righteous but 
sinners to repentance. His burning and un- 
qualified denunciations were for what the Jews 
took, and for what we take, to be the blame- 
less life, the faultless career ; for those who 
thought themselves more righteous than 
others, and therefore more meritorious of 
providential benefits. The difference he saw 
between men was not that some were sinners 
while others were not, but that some saw only 
their brothers as sinners, while others, with 
their individual sin, felt the moral pain and 
shame of all human life as a guilt and suffer- 
ing of their own, to be personally expiated. 
Those who have the truest individual convic- 
tion of sin have the greatest social sense of 
sin; they feel their share and guilt in the sin 
of the world, and take it all as their own to 
bear away. Instead of losing their life in 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. I4I 

seeking an individual extrication, they find their 
life through losing it in the universal extrica- 
tion. It is thus that God has been obliged 
to make some of his greatest saints out of 
greatest sinners. With only such as know 
themselves as sinners, see themselves to be 
yet undone and unmade, has God been able to 
work out our one human moral creation. The 
truly repentant awaken to the largest social 
conscience, though they may not know what 
has come to them, and may express themselves 
in the most individualistic terms. Repentance 
is a social process and a social realization. 

Now, as the redeemed life grows into the 
redemptive, its course becomes more and more 
that of the true penitent. All increase in 
faith, in devotion to our Lord's service of man, 
is an increase in genuine humility. We come 
to see, even when we place our whole life 
upon the altar of human need, how little there 
is we can render unto our Redeemer in return 
for his redemption of our life. The deepest 
and largest life, and the richest possession and 
costliest sacrifice, are cheap and inadequate 



142 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

when we measure them by the cross of our 
salvation. It is not meet, we sometimes feel, 
that Christ's holy name be on our lips. The 
more intolerant we are of sin, the deeper and 
uglier the sins we find to root out of our 
hearts. We are paralyzed more by our own 
follies and failures than by the sins and mis- 
judgments of the world. What we thought 
to be love for Christ and the pursuit of his 
righteousness for man, often proves to be an 
insidious self-love. We do the greatest harm 
where we meant to be most helpful, and work 
death where we meant to give life. We see 
in ourselves, in moments of moral candor, the 
evil things we most abominate in others. In 
those hours of rare spiritual honesty, when we 
look at ourselves in God's mirror of the Christ, 
and there behold the ethical realities of our 
life, we confess to ourselves that we have no 
strength to war against the hosts of selfish 
impulses, the pride, the frivolity, the envy, the 
lust, the self-deceit, the hardness and exclu- 
siveness, by which we seem overthrown. And 
when we think of arraying our own weakness 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, 1 43 

and folly against the powerful and honored 
wrongs of the world, it often seems that we 
can do no better thing for man than get out 
of God's way, and leave his work to purer 
faiths and stronger hearts than ours. 

But there are individual experiences of 
judgment and repentance, the issues of which 
infinitely outweigh the daily penitential expe- 
rience. An unexpected crisis comes which 
finds a man in what appears to be the last 
ditch, fallen there and helpless to rise. As 
with Peter, the fall in itself is not the thing 
of consequence, but the long course of self- 
will and false values it discloses and judges. 
Upon the power of the man to rise from 
that extremity of weakness, with its utter ex- 
haustion of moral nerve, God seems to stake 
all his interest in not only the man himself, 
but in his redemptive utility and world mis- 
sion. What looks like the last effort of a 
divine desperation to save, before the soul's 
case is finally closed, forces upon human help- 
lessness the supreme struggle which might- 
iest human strength would pale to meet. All 



144 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

the forces of the universe are felt to be 
straining for the life or death of the man, 
in the revealing moment of choice and des- 
tiny. 

Nor is the moment of revelation and des- 
tiny always brief as to time ; it may stretch 
into years. We sometimes long pursue a 
course of life we think righteous, suddenly to 
awaken to the fact that it is wrong and 
deadly, while we seem unable to find a way 
into the right. There come days of black- 
ness, when we would know the truth about 
ourselves at any cost, and yet we know not 
whether we be God's or Satan's. The lake 
of fire would be gladsome, the worst torment 
an ecstasy, if it would only burn up all self- 
deceit and hypocrisy, all self-will and faith- 
lessness, and show us our ethical realities ; 
while the most imagined bliss of a material 
heaven would be an intolerable horror, if it 
disclosed not to us the naked truth about our 
life. There comes an hour, so great is our 
moral agony, in which we care not whether 
there be a God, if only there be a sure right 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. I45 

in distinction from the surely wrong. But, 
having sometime held back from the prom- 
ised land of moral freedom, we are doomed to 
wander in the wilderness of bitter perplexity. 
Are the angels of light we follow sweet and 
holy messengers of duty, or disguised demons 
of delusion and ruin ? Is the path we walk a 
way of unrecognized self-will, or the way of 
the Lord into the service and wholeness of 
sacrifice ? Are the words we speak for truth 
the voice of one crying the approach of God 
in a freer human life, or the alarm of a dis- 
eased human spirit ? Is our agony the gnaw- 
ing of the worm that dieth not, or is it the 
simple want of an adventuring faith in the 
way God would take our steps ? These are 
not strange questions, if our religious experi- 
ences have touched their heights and depths ; 
if we are witnesses and reporters of the actual 
processes of our spiritual evolution ; if we 
have introduced the scientific method into the 
subjective world, so that we are able to speak 
words of life we have touched, tasted, or han- 
dled ; if we have gone through the wilderness 



146 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

of ethical perplexity into the realm and mo- 
tivity of moral freedom. I do not say that 
these have been the needful facts of our ethi- 
cal progress, or that man will continue with- 
out end in this wilderness ; but they are the 
actual facts we meet in the subjective world, 
which is after all the real world. 

But whether the revealing moment be long 
with moral scepticism, or quick with vision 
and instant with decision, it wakes us to 
moral realities by a matchless agony, in which 
we face two immediate ultimates. One of 
these means loss of faith in the existence of 
right, with disorder and ruin of soul and 
mind, the death of the body coming last, 
— spiritual, intellectual, and physical disinte- 
gration. The other means the rise of faith 
to moral vision, regenerating the spirit by 
a wholly new perspective of human relations 
and resources ; enlightening the reason with 
the beginnings of an endless knowing ; renew- 
ing the body through commanding it to wait 
on the Lord in his service. As Epictetus has 
said, ours '' is a storm, the greatest of all 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 47 

storms, the storm of strong suggestions that 
sweep reason away." **The contest,'* he says, 
^*is great, the task is divine; it is for king- 
ship, for freedom." Knowing ourselves caught 
in the mighty movement of forces that will 
grind us to powder, or else recast our life in 
a new mould yet hid from us in the thought 
of God, we can only pray to become plastic 
in the hand that unmakes but to remake, 
until we are made perfect. 

Repentance unto service is the end for 
which God risks us in these judgment pro- 
cesses, involving our utter ruin a while, or else 
our birth into a wholly new world of moral 
consciousness. That righteousness may in- 
crease and abound, are we thus afflicted with 
revelations of our sin. For a social fruit- 
age too great for our thought, and a destiny 
too wondrous for our faith, the love of God 
chastens us by experiences so profound as 
to hide their full meaning, even after long 
years of suffering and service. If we come 
forth from these processes fully repentant, 
our minds turned from self-seeking to feed- 



148 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

ing the sheep, though we bear a life-long 
shame into our service and a thorn in our 
flesh, we can glory in our weakness because 
of the strength it will be to the brethren, 
and rejoice even in the gnawing of the 
worm that dieth not and the fire that is not 
quenched. The soul that has squarely met 
and conquered the forces of conflicts so mor- 
tal, whether in the pit or on the heights, has 
felt what Paul calls the birth pangs of the 
labor of God for the divine sonship of our 
creation. It has literally changed its attitude 
toward God and human life, turning from 
the unconscious pursuit of individual happi- 
ness to the conscious and deliberate pursuit 
of service as the sole rightness of life and 
the one common human good. It will bring 
forth fruit worthy of repentance, fit for the 
social food and gladness. 

An enduring repentance is always a social 
realization ; it is a change of mind and life 
from the service of self to the service of 
others. Not by inward brooding, in mere 
subjective processes, can repentance fulfil it- 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 149 

self ; it must be worked out in service, and 
save itself by moral adventure. Upon the 
merciful errands of the kingdom of God, in 
the corners and by-ways of hid and helpless 
need, on the open field of moral conquest, 
along the highway of social crusade and sac- 
rifice, by brave redemptive deeds and fruit- 
ful saving words, must repentance prove its 
reality and vindicate its confession. Repen- 
tance that is not an immediate and continu- 
ous turning to service, and that does not 
become a grateful social mission and a gra- 
cious moral chivalry, soon ceases to have 
truth and value ; and then its form and pro- 
fession become the hypocrisy of life and the 
curse of religion. It is the social feeling that 
produces repentance ; and through the rise 
of this feeling in unselfish interests, and its 
growth into generous actions, does repentance 
remake and glorify life. 

There is no holier and more beautiful ex- 
ample of this than the much misinterpreted 
story of the thief on the cross. He was 
probably not a thief, in the usual sense of 



150 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

that term, but a member of some guerilla 
band of revolutionists, and evidently a very 
noble man by nature. The '^ dying thief '* 
knew nothing of the salvation we talk about, 
but felt that some significant and tremendous 
wrong was being done that marvellous pa- 
tient man on the other cross, and his heart 
made offer of all he could give. Only after 
he had exhausted his possibility to help, did 
he make the simple human request for a 
kindly place in the memory of him whom 
some called Lord, when he should come in 
the better justice of the kingdom which every 
Jew was, rightly or wrongly, expecting to 
see realized in his nation. Through the me- 
dium of sympathy that turned his mind from 
his own suffering and disgrace to the de- 
fence of his sacred fellow-victim, the robber 
was unknowingly touched by the glory of 
the great sacrifice taking place beside him. 
It was his instinctive and thoughtful concern 
for the suffering and public injury of an- 
other, his honest and chivalric human feel- 
ing, that gave him such instant fellowship 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, 151 

with Jesus, and made the grateful fellow- 
ship thus begun upon these two crosses of 
torture, each supporting its dying victim as 
a decreed outlaw, a veritable paradise of God, 
a communion of heaven, on the earth. 

Repentance unto service is nothing else than 
the simple acceptance of the salvation which 
Jesus sacrificed himself to procure. To repent 
is to turn one's mind from self-seeking to the 
service of others, and to accept the sacrifice of 
self in order to serve as the law of one's life. 
Jesus meant his life to illustrate this law so 
fully and powerfully that at last all human life 
would repent by turning to it in willing and 
loving obedience, and the kingdoms of the 
world thus become the kingdom of God. He 
did not come to protect us from God, but to 
deliver us unto God, and protect us from our- 
selves. He did not come to make God differ- 
ent from what he had always been, and always 
will be, but to show us what God eternally 
is, that we might be propitiated and made 
satisfied with God's kind of life, and receive 
the law of his being and working as the law of 



152 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

our being and working. His sacrifice was not 
a substitute for righteousness ; it is the eternal 
definition of righteousness. Jesus* righteous- 
ness saves no man unless he has it ; it does no 
man good beyond his practice of it in his life. 
There is no righteousness but the sacrifice of 
love in service. Jesus' sacrifice thus shows us 
what we are to repent from and repent to, so 
that our repentance may be intelligent and 
effectual. 

Then no man realizes the repentance by 
which Jesus saves until he offers his whole 
life to God upon the altar of human need. 
Jesus' sacrifice saves one, or makes him right, 
no more than it repeats itself in his life. We 
are not reconciled to God through Christ until 
we are reconciled to the life that exhausts its 
possibilities in the sacrifice of service. By ac- 
cepting his sacrifice as the law by which we 
live do we accept Jesus as the Christ, and 
become Christian in fact. To follow this 
Christ means to follow him where he goes, 
into the midst of the world's wrong to set 
it right. He who tries to follow Christ only 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, 1 53 

for what he can get out of him is not saved, 
but lost ; he is not truly repentant, and may 
be the worst of self-seekers. Judas is the 
one example of a man who followed Jesus 
simply for the sake of what Jesus might 
do for him. 

It is with repentance that the greatest moral 
dangers come, because of the religious igno- 
rance of its social necessity. The selfishness 
from which Jesus came delivering, theology 
has made fundamental to the gospel of deliver- 
ance. It has changed the ground of moral 
appeal from the kingdom of God to an arbi- 
trary system of selfish rewards and punish- 
ments. The salvation of giving one's life to 
the good of God in others has been changed 
into a sterile religious self-interest. The call 
of Jesus to deny self, and renounce all that one 
has, in the service of bearing away the sins of 
the world, has been perverted into a call to 
accept a scheme of individual escape to some 
other and unreal w^orld. The appeal of Jesus 
to life, to the divinest human ideals of holiest 
sacrifice, has been set forth as an appeal to 



154 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

death, subverting the gospel of the kingdom, 
and denying the reality of redemption. 

The doctrine of divine punishment, as it has 
been preached, unremedial and unloving when 
not penal or vengeful, has been at once a false 
gospel and a destroyer of effectual repentance. 
Punishment itself is a revelation of life, and it 
is to life that punishment appeals. The very 
sin of men is a revelation of their sonship 
in God. The misery of men, when they drink 
the dregs of sin, marks the difference between 
what they are and what they ought to be. 
The ruins of men attest their moral dignity 
as sons of God. The wickedness of men is the 
measure of their capacity for goodness. It is 
the fact of what it might have been, and may 
yet be, that makes a life wasted in self-seeking 
so awful a spectacle, so solemn a tragedy. 

Then not to death, but to life, with its 
service and destiny, is the appeal for repen- 
tance to be made. All the forces of God^s 
universe make for life, and not for death. 
The world is redeemed, and sin has no more 
dominion over us. Unto us have been granted 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, 1 55 

all things that pertain to godliness. We have 
a right to hearts untroubled and unafraid. 
In the world we have tribulation ; but the 
Son of man has overcome the world, and re- 
demption is the fundamental reality. Sin 
abounds ; but grace much more abounds. 
The billows still roll over us ; but there shall 
be no more sea. The night is dark a while, 
and we see not yet as we are seen ; but there 
shall be no more night. Death is swift and 
triumphant now, and the hunger of the grave 
insatiable ; but God shall wipe away every 
tear, and there shall be no more death. Dev- 
ils rage, plot, and destroy ; but hell shall be 
cast with death into the burning lake. 

This carries no comfort to the sinner who 
wills to sin, as some would have us mean, 
but only terrible warnings of immeasurable 
woe. Since *' we live indeed in the king- 
doms of redemption," as Rothe says, ''and 
no more in the kingdoms of this world," we 
have no excuse for acting as though we were 
not redeemed ; no excuse for obeying the 
laws and maxims of selfishness. We cannot 



156 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

get away from the kingdom of redemption, 
nor the pursuit of its forces, except by moving 
out of the universe ; and there is no other 
to move into. We have no choice but to 
accept this redemptive economy and its facts, 
with its laws of sacrifice by which we are re- 
deemed, and the moral destiny which Jesus 
its initiator reveals. We may be sure that 
only deadly consequences can follow the 
moral scepticism that ignores this redemp- 
tion and denies its law ; be sure that we 
shall have to be reconciled to our destiny 
at last, though it takes aeons of the flames 
that increase our sufferings with their fury 
as life hardens. If there were some place 
where a man could get away from God and 
his kingdom of redemption, from its un- 
changing facts and pursuing forces, to be 
abandoned to the utter and inconceivable iso- 
lation of undisputed self-will, there might be 
a sort of comfort in even that depthless, 
matchless misery, that fabled condition of 
the lost. But whither shall we flee from his 
presence, and whence can a man get beyond 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. \^J 

the scourge of the love of God ? If we ride 
the winds of the morning to the uttermost 
parts of the earth, or find a way to reach the 
most distant stars, the wrath of the Lamb 
will be there with its judgments. If we 
make our bed in the grave, we cannot make 
sure our soul will see corruption, even when it 
would. The love of God is in the foundations 
of hell, to light its fires ; we can go there only 
to be with God, and face our destiny anew 
and more terribly. The disordered reason 
will still be haunted with meanings struck 
forth from the law of Calvary, which is the 
sole law of the universe, having dominion 
over the whole and each minutest part, 
whether the parts will or no. The universe 
has no smallest secret place where the vision 
and law of Calvary can be escaped. '^ We 
live indeed in the kingdoms of redemption;" 
and we can find nothing else to reckon with 
than the facts and forces of its universal 
economy. 

Modern Christianity, with all its works of 
power and words of truth, has never felt 



158 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

the force of the apostolic conception of re- 
demption. Even the Hebrew prophets had 
a far larger thought of redemption than 
theological Christendom. They suffered and 
wrought in the vision of a redeemed world 
and a perfected human society. The Scrip- 
tures are possessed with the idea of redemp- 
tion as a social reality. It is human life and 
all its activities, not a number of individuals, 
that its prophet and apostle writers conceive 
to be redeemed. 

Of course, this kingdom of redemption seems 
hardly to prove itself a reality at times. We 
see the hardest and most Christless ethical 
scepticism domineering as strictest religion, 
while much the world calls doubt is but the 
cry of the divine childhood of men unto the 
Father of their life. Loveless spiritual pride, 
atheistic piety, religious unbelief in rightness, 
— the things our Lord rebuked with such un- 
restrained scorn and consuming anger, — sit 
in judgment upon souls that travail in the 
moral anguish of a vicarious service. Great 
religious assemblies distract the church and 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE. 1 59 

nation with strifes of words about definitions, 
while wickedly ignorant and silent as to the so- 
cial crimes and legal robberies of the churchly. 
Organized misrepresentations of Christ appear 
before the world as defenders of his faith and 
protectors of his truth. 

Then the great doers and witnesses, the 
faithful servants of the race, have not seen 
in the flesh the results of their faithfulness. 
Those who have worked hardest to right the 
wrongs of the earth have gone to death 
amidst apparent defeat, disaster, and disap- 
pointment. Elijah and the prophets, Paul and 
the apostles, Savonarola and the reformers, 
Mazzini and many other witnesses to the 
Christ in human life, went to their rest in 
the cloud of immediate failure. 

Yet the most glowing prophecies of uni- 
versal righteousness have been born in the 
throes of sacrificial suffering. The rejected 
Isaiah saw the whole earth at rest, brother- 
hood between men and nations accomplished, 
the fields and forces of nature obeying man's 
moral law, and a political righteousness real- 



l60 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

ized that was able to effect social peace and 
quietness. It was Jesus* vision of the cross 
of his own agony that widened to take in the 
human world : '^ And I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto myself.'* 
John saw the new heavens and the new earth 
from his prison rocks on Patmos. While wait- 
ing in Rome for the executioner's sword, Paul 
wrote his letter of heavenly consolation to 
the Philippians, promising that every knee in 
heaven, on earth, and under the earth, should 
yet bow to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, to 
the glory of God the Father. The restored 
Peter, sent to realize his repentance and glo- 
rify his shame in feeding the sheep, and to 
succeed his Lord and the Baptist as the 
messenger of repentance to his nation, fore- 
saw *'the times of restoration of all things, 
whereof God spake by the mouth of his holy 
prophets which have been since the world 
began." 

Thus the great faith in God*s good ways 
and times, the eager expectancy that all wrong 
is being made right, inheres in the holy pas- 



REPENTANCE UNTO SERVICE, l6l 

sions that are able to cause that sacrifice of 
life which bears away the sin of the world. 
A man's faith in human life comes to be 
measured at last by his self-denial in human 
service. They believe most in the redemp- 
tion of the world who are engaged in actually 
redeeming it ; who commit themselves most 
fully to the service of their brethren ; who 
turn their minds wholly to feeding the sheep. 
We have the largest and most commanding 
visions of a redeemed and righteous society 
when exhausting our possibilities in social sac- 
rifice. The human redemption will prove as 
real to us as our repentance, and the human 
prospect as divine and glorious as our ser- 
vice. Wherever there is a rich and fruitful 
life pouring itself into the world, there is a 
soul uplifted and uplifting with a hope for 
man which failure only deepens and widens. 

So every moral step of the individual, every 
rise from a fall and renewal of effort, is so 
much social strength and gladness for the 
world, so much service and power given into 
the hand that remakes and makes perfect. 



1 62 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

The work will be no failure ; however long it 
takes, soever sore the making and remaking 
process, it will be finished in righteousness. 
For Christ himself is God's eternal judgment 
on man; and to be like him is our destiny, 
while to serve like him is our repentance. 



V. 

MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 

Rom. VIII. 20, 21. 



And thus at length we see what human progress means. It means 
throwing off the brute .inheritance, — gradually throwing it off through ages 
of struggle that are by and by to make struggle needless. Man is slowly 
passing from a primitive social state in which he was little better than a 
brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have 
become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The 
ape and the tiger in human nature will become extinct. Theology has had 
much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less 
than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and the process 
of evolution is an advance toward truj salvation. Fresh value is thus added 
to human life. The modern prophet, employing the methods of science, 
may again proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Work ye, 
therefore, early and late, to prepare its coming. — John Fzske, in "The 
Destiny of Man." 

I HAVE heard it asked by cynical young men, who imagine that religion 
is at an end because they have none themselves : But why should I live 
for others ? Where is this law of love in nature ? Where, one may ask, is 
it not? Nor could a question more completely illustrate the anarchy of 
thought which is at the bottom of many of our *' present discontents." The 
conception of self-sacrifice is, of course, no invention of Christ, or any one 
teacher ; it is the inevitable outcome of social existence. It commenced 
long ago, when barbaric man first realized that, if he and his fellows were to 
live together in any comfort, it could only be on some basis of give and take. 
To live absolutely each man for himself could not be possible if all were to 
live together. In course of time, in addition to utility, certain more sensitive 
individuals began to see a charm, a beauty, in this consideration for others. 
Gradually a sort of sanctity attached to it, and Nature had once more illus- 
trated her mysterious method of evolving from rough and even savage neces- 
sities her lovely shapes and her tender dreams. To assert, then, with some 
recent critics of Christianity, that that law of brotherly love which is its 
central teaching is impracticable of application to the needs of society, is 
simply to deny the very first law by which society exists. — Richard Le 
Gallienne, in "The Religion of a Literary Man." 

164 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL 
SPIRIT. 

For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but 
by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself 
also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the lib- 
erty of the glory of the children of God. — Rom. viii. 20, 21. 

Paul could not tolerate a fragmentary con- 
ception of life. He must have a cosmic 
philosophy, a philosophy of history that would 
also be a philosophy of life, in order to keep 
his sanity, and work with intelligence and 
increasing hope. The demands of his intel- 
lect needed to be satisfied, in order to keep 
him from living in a chronic state of moral 
inflammation. 

The apostle's letter to the Roman Chris- 
tians is his philosophy of both nature and 
history. That which we know as the eighth 
chapter is the greatest word on evolution that 

165 



1 66 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

has been spoken, with the possible exception 
of some expressions of the prophet Isaiah. 

The dependence of material forces on human 
character, with the social nature of that de- 
pendence, is a true expression of Paul's idea 
in what we have divided into the twentieth 
and twenty-first verses of the eighth chapter 
of the Roman letter. To the end that the 
sons of God might be evolved from its pro- 
cesses, the whole creation was subjected to 
vanity, not of its own will, but according to 
the reason of God. But our English word 
vanity is an inadequate and now misleading 
translation. Literally translated, Paul says 
that the creation was subjected to transitory 
nature, to things that change and pass away. 
This subjection was strictly an ethical pro- 
cess, with a glorious deliverance in view. 
When man should at last awake to his full 
and destined relations with God, to his ethical 
relations with the forces of nature, and thus 
realize the universal priesthood of his life, 
the natural forces from which he had been 
evolved, whose subject creature he had been, 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT, 167 

would in turn become subject to him, obey- 
ing his righteous will. The material world, 
in all its operations and manifestations, would 
become man's obedient servant, the respon- 
sive instrument of his thought and moral 
touch. This was the liberty of the glory of 
the sons of God, upon which God had set 
the hope of his heart, and upon which the 
eager outlook of creation was fixed. 

In this, Paul was characteristically Hebrew. 
The Hebrew mind was never able to conceive 
of natural forces as other than forces of right- 
eousness. The sympathy between the morals 
of man and the actions of the physical world 
was fundamental to Hebrew thought. The 
unity of life which is the ground of the newer 
philosophy, the sociality of all life and forces 
which evolutionary science has discovered, 
was assumed as a matter of course in Hebrew 
political and religious thinking. 

By no other than this evolution from natural 
subjection to moral sovereignty can the full 
freedom of man be realized. Man is not free 
until he has made subject his subjection to 



1 68 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

the physical, and entered into the freedom of 
God to use the material as the language of 
the spiritual ; until there are no more hap- 
penings in human life, man is still struggling 
with his brute inheritance. The liberty of 
the glory of the sons of God is an ethical 
liberty ; it is the liberty of right living. 
Freedom is not the capacity to choose be- 
tween right and wrong. Men do not sin 
because they are free moral beings ; they 
are not free moral beings because they sin. 
No man is born free, neither Adam nor 
Jesus ; no man is free until he has made in- 
telligent and loving choice of the right. 
Freedom is right relations ; it is the realiza- 
tion of the power to command through obe- 
dience. 

Subjection to transitory things, to processes 
of evolution and education, did not necessi- 
tate sin. We cannot put upon the natural 
facts and forces in which our life is rooted, 
and by which it must grow, the responsibil- 
ity for sin. Nothing is evil in itself, and 
sin is not in the nature of any sort of things. 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 69 

It is the abuse or disuse of a thing, making 
it a negation of God and his righteousness 
so that it counts for nothing in growing the 
moral man, that makes it sin. Things be- 
come evil by our using them for other ends 
than God's great human thought. When 
Paul speaks of the mind of flesh, he does 
not mean that flesh is evil, but the fleshly 
mind — the mind absorbed in providing for 
the comfort and convenience of the flesh. 
The mind of flesh is sin and death because 
it has fallen into the service of the flesh, 
instead of using the flesh in that moral ser- 
vice which ever rises toward the freedom of 
perfectness. Life falls by turning inward 
upon self and downward upon the flesh ; it 
rises through turning outward in service and 
upward in spirit, obeying the will that shall 
at last subject all physical forces to a fin- 
ished moral and social creation. 

God did not mean we should sin, but he 
could prevent our sinning; sin is in the 
world because God could not, without our 
conscious working together with him to that 



I/O SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

end, keep it out. God has and ethically 
uses all the power there is, and this subjec- 
tion was the best he could do for his crea- 
tion ; he could do no more and act morally. 
Speaking after the manner of men, there 
was no way by which God could create 
human life without taking the divine chance 
that it would move through sin in its evo- 
lution, education, and perfection. So God 
made the eternal venture, in the hope that 
even through sin man would yet come forth 
in the freedom of a perfect creation. 

God thus cannot make man free save 
through man's conscious and willing co-op- 
eration, God and man becoming of one mind, 
and working the same works. God is a 
social being ; his reign is a social reign. 
The Father of men would not be even their 
accepted moral tyrant. He will rule with, 
not over, man. Liberty of sonship is con- 
scious co-operation with God; it is the power 
to use the power that God uses, and for the 
same ends. 

If all this means that we must give up 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. I/I 

the philosophic absolute God, why not ? We 
shall have no great loss, and the gain of a 
Christian God and universe to our thinking. 
Better than thinking, we shall come to hold 
with God a human and social fellowship, 
having found him to be a Father, with feel- 
ings like the children who are his offspring. 
For no philosophic, passionless peace is God's. 
The conception of a God without passion is 
at one time Buddhistic and at another pan- 
theistic ; again Roman, and then Calvinistic ; 
at last materialistic. But the God whose 
fatherhood Jesus revealed is love ; and love 
is passionate, or it is not love. The unend- 
ing regenerations that make the progress of 
man, the divinities and vitalities of his na- 
ture, are the passions of God. The unresting 
activities with which the universe lives and 
grows are the energies of God's affections. 
The truths of men are flashes from the soul 
of God, the heroisms and reformations of 
man God's enthusiasms. 

The social dependence of every sort of life 
upon every other sort accounts for human 



1/2 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

experience, and becomes the ground of our 
common hope. For slavery or freedom, we 
are bound up together, and with us the be- 
neficence or destructiveness of the physical 
elements. It is not numberless unrelated in- 
dividuals, either separated or aggregated, but 
our whole human life, with the woof and 
warp of physical creation in which life is 
caught, that jointly travails in birth-throes 
for the sons of God. If there yet remained 
one life out of relations among men, and 
every other life were living by faith in the 
righteousness which God has defined by the 
sacrifice of his Son, human life and its phys- 
ical world would still be disordered, sorrow- 
ful with redemptive pains. It is- this creative 
and redemptive agony of toil, in which God 
and all human life jointly travail together 
with our material world, which prophecy and 
science are alike seeing in various ways, that 
now appeals to the individual to consider the 
whole sacrifice of life as but a reasonable 
service. 

Man's relation to the physical world is thus 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 73 

wholly an ethical relation ; it is also a re- 
demptive relation. The material universe is 
not mere matter, consisting of chemical affin- 
ities ; it is a living and spiritual thing, sym- 
pathetic and suffering with the redemption 
and destiny of man, dependent upon his social 
spirit. Without the ethical co-operation of 
man with God, nature itself cannot put forth 
its fuller glory, or disclose its hid treasures 
of goodness and beauty. The perfect order 
and good of the physical world are dependent 
upon the moral order of the human world. 
The prophet was truly scientific in saying 
that the wilderness would blossom as the 
rose, and the deserts become watered gar- 
dens of the Lord, when the redemption of 
man from sin into wholeness should be ac- 
complished. Thus conceived, the physical 
earth becomes the object of sacred care and 
affectional interest, and the stones beneath 
our feet cry out to the sons of men to mani- 
fest themselves as sons of God. The winds 
are thus God's messengers, with the light- 
nings his social revelations, and the mirage 



174 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

of the desert his command to social service, 
while the air we breathe is the living breath 
of his infinite soul. Edison and Nicola Tesla 
are thus preparing the way of the Lord, as 
truly as Luther and Cromwell. The material 
becomes spiritual, and the spiritual divinely 
material ; so that we have a new materiality 
with a new spirituality. This spirituality of 
the material suggests the need of a new term 
to denote the idea of the unity of all the 
elements of life, both conscious and uncon- 
scious, to the common understanding. 

Spiritual and natural harmony are one and 
the same thing. Who knows but there would 
at last be no accidents, and the forces of na- 
ture have no furies to destroy, with men in 
perfect harmony with God .? Behind the de- 
structive effects of nature, there seems to lie 
the destructive self-will of man. We are hav- 
ing revelations of this in many sorts of recent 
investigations. Scientific men are beginning 
to tell us that desolating wars of past centu- 
ries are one cause of the earth's cyclones, its 
droughts and deserts. It is not only that cli- 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT, 1/5 

mate makes the man, but also true that man 
makes climate. Mazzini notes that Athens 
and Sparta had the same climate, but that 
one produced man's greatest intellectual de- 
velopment, where the other failed, because 
of the difference in character between their re- 
spective institutions. While individual greed 
and social infidelity bring physical perils 
through the waste of our American forests, 
the new social conscience undertakes the irri- 
gation of arid lands. The author of ^* Three 
Months in a Workshop,'' that delightful social 
narrative that comes to us from Germany, in 
giving a certain instance, says : ^' So a small 
technical invention becomes a great social 
and ethical influence — in this instance for 
good — and accomplishes more than many 
sermons and other efforts at reforms." Even 
in the realm of the artificial, we have had 
the President of the United States seeking 
to awaken legislative interest in the fact that 
the thousands incidentally slaughtered in rail- 
way traffic need not die, if the national sense 
of the sacredness of human life were equal 



1/6 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

to the national sense of the material values 
of corporate gains. 

The sciences, with social investigations, are 
thus unconsciously, and as if by divine acci- 
dent, viewing human life from the point long 
ago reached by Moses and Isaiah, Jesus and 
Paul; and they are reaching it faster by far 
than the church, which has the oracles of 
God's seeing ones committed to its care. The 
physical sciences, which we once thought lead- 
ing us straight to atheistic materialism, are 
now unknowingly working with the prophets 
and apostles of Jesus to lift human life into 
a higher and vaster realm of motivity. 

In this realm we meet with Jesus, discover- 
ing that no statement of the natural law and 
fruits of man's relation to the physical world 
has ever been so exactly scientific as his 
words spoken to the multitudes on the moun- 
tain. Warning them to lay up the treasures 
of life rather than the treasures of material 
gain, he shows so simply that this heavenly 
treasure of life consists in the social service ; 
that only by each man living for the social 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 77 

righteousness, can the productive and distribu- 
tive processes of nature become the organized 
bounty of God, supplying each according to 
his needs, while each according to his powers 
engages in the social service. According to 
Jesus, what we call the accumulation of wealth 
is not only not natural law, but is the improv- 
ident distraction of nature, as well as a fright- 
ful social disease. Social democracy, with 
economic equality, thus becomes at once the 
realization of both natural law and the reli- 
gion of Jesus. 

Material dependence on spiritual relations 
makes credible and rational many things which 
pass the belief of thoughtful men, and which 
have never been accredited by them save 
through a sort of blind faith. The influence 
of mind over matter has come to be the un- 
written creed among skilful physicians of even 
the most conservative type ; and it is the creed 
of their practice much more than of their 
theory. One of the most honorable and pro- 
fessionally trusted practitioners of the older 
school of physicians recently said to me, that 



178 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

many such as he could no longer place a limit 
on the psychical or spiritual influences upon 
the health and life of the body ; that the chief 
effort of the advanced men of his profession 
now is, first to get the patient into right rela- 
tions with environment, and then as fast as 
possible into a harmonious state of mind. Not- 
withstanding all the follies and irrational prac- 
tices that result from wrong conceptions of the 
fact, it is none the less coming to be a fact of 
consciousness that disease somehow springs 
from sin and ignorance. Sickness is false or 
unsocial relations. The knowledge and prac- 
tice of health promises to be one of the revela- 
tions and gains of the social pursuit of right- 
eousness. John Inglesant is made to tell how, 
with swaying and clouded reason, he kept 
from insanity by walking for two years with 
his mind steadily fixed on God. The holiness 
of God in human life is the perfect moral, 
mental, and physical wholeness of man. Dis- 
ease will sometime be treated through moral 
diagnosis. 

The ethical or social nature of health simpli- 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 79 

fies the whole matter of Jesus' miracles. I 
have no opinions to offer as to the actual oc- 
currence of all the miracles he is said to have 
wrought. My faith has so little to do with 
these, that I can almost say that I am indiffer- 
ent as to their historicity. Yet they present 
scarcely any difficulty to either my reason or 
my faith. Being the perfect ethical being that 
he was, the one whole Son of man, it was 
wholly natural that Jesus should work what 
we call miracles. In reality, there was nothing 
supernatural about them, or about anything 
else, so far as Jesus was concerned. Standing 
hi the relations he did, in harmony alike with 
God and the material universe, it was natural 
that physical things and forces should obey his 
will. Disease could not exist in the harmony 
of his presence. It was natural that he should 
reveal love as the healing and regenerative law 
of nature ; natural that the Son of man in per- 
fect harmony with God should command the 
natural forces and elements, and that the winds 
and the waves should obey him. Instead of 
being an exhibition of something supernatural, 



l8o SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

the miracles of Jesus simply reveal man in 
ethical relations with nature, and nature in 
normal relations with man. They reveal the 
waiting social harmony of all life in the fully 
manifested sons of God. 

It is in its social forces that the immortality 
of life inheres. By the immortal we usually 
mean that which is everlasting ; but everlast- 
ingness is simply the incident of immortality. 
We are not immortal because we exist. It is 
moral strength, not existence, that is immor- 
tal ; moral strength, not existence, that outlives 
death. The immortality of life is not some 
vague individual bliss — the meaningless exist- 
ence of pietism ; it is the persistence of moral 
or social forces in personality. The individual 
life may be said to be as immortal as the ideal 
in which it is invested. The social nature of 
righteousness once understood, immortality 
becomes easy of understanding ; indeed, almost 
anything else becomes inconceivable. Prog- 
ress furnishes many historical instances of the 
power of a great idea to take up a frail body 
and give it, if not health, a virility and capacity 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. l8l 

to endure that exhaust and astonish the strong. 
I think I can understand a little of how the 
passional force and momentum of a great idea 
could pick up the physical Jesus from the tomb, 
and send him about his work. With his life 
caught in a world movement that was to go on 
unto the world's perfection, death became im- 
possible, even ridiculous. Jesus could not die, 
any more than righteousness could die. Why 
should I die t If my life is all invested in 
working the works of Jesus, in accentuating 
his idea and realizing his ideal, what have I to 
do with death, or death with me } Suppose 
I to-day experience what men call dying, I can- 
not see that it has anything to do with my 
keeping on with the work to which my life is 
committed. 

Individual immortality depends upon the so- 
cial spirit of the individual, on the strength 
and reality of his love, on the vitality of his 
relation to the social organism. It is, as it 
ought to be, the race life that is immortal ; 
and the individual becomes immortal through 
fulfilling his life as a function of the race life. 



1 82 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

With the immortality of the race life we are 
all the time face to face. We see that life 
does not die ; that the life of each generation 
is borne on to the next, to be increased and 
still borne on. It may be that we shall one 
day see that only the lack of unity, our try- 
ing to live as fragments or dismembered mem- 
bers, keeps us from whipping death from our 
midst. Perhaps it is as a man of divine vision 
that Mr. Howells speaks, in one of his novels, 
when he suggests that the mystery of death 
will be taken away when the law of love pre- 
vails on the earth. Humanity at its worst, 
through all its unexplained sorrows, along the 
darkest labyrinths of its pilgrimage of prog- 
ress, has never been without some spirits pure 
enough to see a deathless and perfected world. 
Sin has never been deep enough to rid the 
race of an inner consciousness, a conscious- 
ness it yet fears to hear or articulate, that 
death is an intruder and enemy in the world, 
having no place in a normal and perfect order, 
and that when sin is eliminated the factor of 
death will disappear. However that may be, 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT, 1 83 

it is upon the redemption and socialization of 
the common life that the immortality of the 
individual must found its hope. This has 
been so perfectly said by Jesus, in speaking 
of his person as the living centre of the 
human organism. '^ I am the vine," he says, 
'' ye are the branches : he that abideth in me, 
and I in him, the same beareth much fruit : 
for apart from me ye can do nothing. If a 
man abide not in me, he is cast forth as 
a branch, and is withered; and they gather 
them, and cast them into the fire, and they 
are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words 
abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it 
shall be done unto you." Acting together as 
members of one living organism, nothing is 
impossible to men, while a glory the eye hath 
not seen nor the mind conceived awaits them. 
But acting as independent and unrelated indi- 
viduals, and not as the living members of the 
one organism of their human life, they be- 
come fragments, to wither and be burned in 
the fires that consume, purify, and remake. 
And they who abide in the human organism 



184 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

as living members will never be lonesome, 
though left alone, for all the tides of life 
that flow from God through man will fill them 
with his joy. Upon the fundamental assump- 
tion of the universal sociality of life Jesus 
bases his religious conceptions, builds his 
social ideal, and grounds his promises of im- 
mortality. 

The material or social interdependence of 
all sorts of life is the chief fact to be consid- 
ered by progress as a whole, and by each in- 
dividual life. In the yet struggling childhood 
of man, as well as in the fuller growth to 
come, there is nothing to be gained but by 
our standing together. We can never realize 
the truth of our life by individualism, by in- 
dependent action. The mystery of life can 
never be known by each seeking to solve 
the problem for himself. The kingdom of 
heaven, so I have somewhere read or heard, 
is not an anarchy of good individuals. No 
man can be, or ought to be, wholly saved 
until human life is saved ; and it is impossi- 
ble for any soul to be saved or lost alone. 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 85 

Without US, Abraham and Moses, EHjah and 
Paul, with all the prophets and apostles 
since, neither can nor would be made perfect. 
The perfection of the individual can be com- 
pleted only through the perfection of the 
human whole. 

The social basis of life commissions love 
as the sole guide to the highest knowledge. 
Our rude sciences, so given to analysis that 
disintegrates rather than empowers, have sepa- 
rated man into absurd departments, dividing 
reason from faith, the affections from the in- 
tellect, facts from feelings, work from pas- 
sion, love from knowledge. But we shall one 
day learn that these are only the childish 
and ethnic beginnings of the science of man. 
Our scientific superstitions will sometime give 
place to the truer science of man as a whole, 
as a microcosm. Then love will no more be 
divided from knowledge, but will become the 
power by which we know, mighty to save and 
build. The things which eye hath not seen, 
nor ear heard, and which have not entered 
into the heart of man, are things of life, hav- 



1 86 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

ing to do with life's organization and perfec- 
tion, and are treasured in the store of God 
for them that love. The great forces of 
the universe, which are ours to be received 
alike through spirit and nature, cannot be ap- 
prehended for the vaster and wholler organ- 
ization of our life, save as they are sought by 
the social love. Only the adventure of love, 
in search for social treasure, can discover the 
unknown physical properties and spiritual re- 
sources of our life ; these are ours with which 
to build the holy city, when love shall teach 
us how to use them. 

** We must never part. 
Are we not halves of one dissevered world, 
Whom this strange chance unites once more ? Part ? Never ! 
Till thou, the lover, know ; and I, the knower, 
Love — until both are saved." ^ 

The redemption and perfection of the human 
organism requires of its members the fullest 
possible participation in all the relations and 
experiences of life. Jesus came, not destroy- 
ing human life, but saving it through the re- 

1 '^ Paracelsus," Robert Browning. 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 8/ 

demption and sanctification of its relations. 
The Christ-life opposes all that savors of ascet- 
icism and moral cowardice, religious aggran- 
dizement and social secularism, regarding each 
of these as a worst atheism ; for atheism is 
the absence of God, or the denial of right- 
eousness, in human relations, — it has nothing 
to do with religious opinion. The gnostic lies 
that have so long cursed philosophic and re- 
ligious thought, darkening the mind of Chris- 
tendom as an evil shadow, and paganizing 
its ethics, atheizing its industry and politics, 
should have no more dominion over us. Our 
human nature is not inherently evil, not dual- 
istic and divided, as these lies have taught 
us, but is one social and holy life coming 
from God. Not to frighten us out of the 
world, or to make us pious atheists in the 
world, but to make every human relation a re- 
ligion, with every human intercourse a social 
sacrament, was the ideal of Jesus. There is 
a wicked correctness of conduct, a lawless rev- 
erence for authority, an immoral chastity, an 
atheistic piety; and the worst of these, be- 



1 88 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

cause the parent of them all, is the atheistic 
piety that is the substance of official religion, 
and is the logical desire of the plunderer and 
the oppressor, the hypocrite and the ecclesi- 
astic, in all nations. To withdraw from re- 
sponsible relations and vital experiences with 
every phase and force of society, for reasons 
material or religious, intellectual or merely 
individual, and to seek religious development 
as something other than the righteousness 
of love in these experiences and relations, is 
to try to sanctify fatal selfishness, and make 
practical atheism holy. Every individual is a 
social problem; and the whole problem of so- 
ciety is every individuars responsibility, his 
call to the most comprehensive social service 
and the richest possible social experience. 
Each individual soul is a universal problem, 
and the destiny of the whole universe inheres 
in each individual soul. There is nothing ac- 
tual or potential in human life that is not sub- 
stantially an indispensable element in every 
individual's ultimate development ; and without 
this development of every individual, neither 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 189 

he nor the human organism can be made 
perfect to survive the strain of the eternal 
becoming of the universe. The problem of 
society is the problem of the whole human 
life, in its seen and unseen spheres, in its 
known and unknown forces, in its universal 
and individual relations; and the destiny of 
no individual can be separated from the human 
whole. With the social interdependence of 
all life must each individual career first of 
all reckon, and upon this ground must every 
social structure build, from it every social 
aspiration rise. 

Even what we call individual self-conscious- 
ness is really a consciousness of relations ; 
there could be no individuality except as a 
function of the social organism. The full 
realization of human individuality is thiough 
universal sociality. Each individual life is a 
universal function ; the whole universe is 
man's social sphere. Albeit the highest, 
man is but one mode or incarnation of the 
universal life. 

By only an intolerable morality then can 



IQO SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

happiness be said to be the lawful pursuit of 
the individual life. While we idly say that 
theories have little to do with practical life, 
the man who is at this moment bargaining 
across the counter, the man who has just 
manipulated the rise or fall of certain stocks 
the man who has just decided upon what 
street he will build his house, the preacher 
who has just decided what set of doctrines 
it will be safest and easiest for him to hold, 
is simply acting out a theory of life for- 
mulated long ago by the philosophers. The 
assumption of happiness as the pursuit of 
the individual life, as the reason for political 
liberty, and as the ground of religious appeal, 
is the acceptance of a false theory that has 
borne much of our social wrong as its evil 
fruit. The pursuit of happiness as the end 
of life is the fundamental social error and 
vice ; it is the social anarchy out of which we 
are struggling. The doctrine is the persis- 
tence of a pagan and anti-social ethic through 
Christian forms and phrases. It is the deliv- 
erance of life to the servitude of transitory 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. I9I 

things, and from the liberty of the glory of 
the sons of God ; thus precisely reversing 
the order of nature which Paul presents, 
making life a devolution rather than an 
evolution. In other words, the pursuit of 
happiness, which is the founding of life on 
its happenings rather than its realities, is 
life's complete enslavement and degradation. 
It is also a real worship of material things 
and forces, far profounder than anything con- 
templated at the heart of the primitive nature 
worships. From the delusion and misery, 
the tyranny and cruelty, of the pursuit of 
happiness, we are making it hard for the 
good Lord to deliver us. No fate can be 
more fearful than one of happiness in a 
world like ours — a world of sin and expi- 
ation, of birth-agony and death-mystery, of 
social sacrifice, calling every life and power 
and affection to its altar. To be willins: to 
be extricated from the common pain and 
social shame, from the storm and stress of 
faith and social travail, is to desire the happi- 
ness of the dead whom Jesus would leave to 



192 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

bury the dead. The pursuit of the social 
righteousness, with the whole life made sacred 
as a sacrifice thereto, is the only reasonable 
pursuit of life. One's work can be lawfully 
decided upon only with reference to its fit- 
ness for enabling the individual to carry on 
his social pursuit. The individual is a living 
instrument by which God may procure the 
common good ; his life a function by which 
God may feed the social organism with uni- 
versal life. By no tolerable ethic can the 
individual pursue other than the ways and 
means of making his life the fullest possible 
sacrifice to the common life, while taking 
from it the least possible for the supply of 
his individual needs. 

Nor can this pursuit of happiness masquer- 
ade in the sophistry of an enlightened self- 
interest as the law of life. We should begin 
to learn from Jesus and nature that he that 
saves his life loses it ; that even a social 
service performed for one's own sake is im- 
moral in its individual aim and effect, what- 
ever its value to society. Not self-interest, 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT. 1 93 

but the social interest, is the natural law of 
the individual life. Interest in one's self, in 
one's own happiness, as the law of life and its 
pursuit, is the cheat and fraud of life. The 
only interest in one's self ethically conceivable 
is an interest in making one's life the best pos- 
sible social function ; in making one's self the 
best possible social member to be fitly joined 
to the social body. But by no honest defi- 
nition can this be called self-interest. It is 
really the highest interest in the social well- 
being, and is the truest form of self-sacrifice. 
The individual life is then a social quest, a 
search for social treasure, an adventure in the 
holy society. Our sacred pilgrimage is alike a 
way of sorrow and a way of glory, making life 
an unending discovery and exploration ; a con- 
tinuing trial and experience. It is true that 
we walk by faith and not by sight ; that we 
must betimes endure to find the right of yes- 
terday, for which we would have died, to-day 
so wrong that to abide in it is death ; that 
what we shall be does not yet appear. But we 
know the way we take. It leads into the fully 



194 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

realized freedom of our eternal sonship, into 
the moral glory of a social transfiguration such 
as no white passion of ours can conceive, upon 
which perfect goal the eager outlook of crea- 
tion is fixed, for which gain God and his uni- 
verse ardently wait. Although we are still in 
the making, and are not yet manifested in the 
image conceived for us in the heart of God, 
yet every human instinct prophetic, every 
human potency that glows with moral vis- 
ion, promises our perfection in the messianic 
ideal of the holy society, and commands each 
life as a sacred function for its realization. 
While our universe is an eternal becoming, 
opening an infinite prospect of adventure in 
knowledge and love, yet human life is not an 
endless development, never to be satisfied or 
fulfilled. Evolution has its limits; God's things 
get made, and his works finished. The works 
of God are not slow for the perf ectness in view, 
while the world is yet very young, its animal 
instincts still clinging hard, and its social in- 
fancy scarce born. The matchless cathedral 
I have seen was built through centuries of war 



MATERIAL WORLD AND SOCIAL SPIRIT, 1 95 

and change, of violence and desecration, of lost 
and restored plans ; yet steadily climbing the 
light, it stands there finished at last, a dream 
of God wrought into stone by his divine men. 
If we will be at peace with God's work, re- 
sponding obediently to his whole way with 
each, taking each our place in the living temple 
of the ascending humanity, through all storm 
and stress our work will abide, with our life a 
glory of God. Deny we each the self that 
would betray our life's search, estrange life's 
social quest, missend life's holy adventure ; 
then ours will be the joy of continuous de- 
crease of interest in self, that the Christ-life 
may increase unto the full freedom of the 
social glory of the children of God. 

The age of the spirit is come. We are mov- 
ing into a new cycle of human growth. Close 
upon us is the social inspiration of the world, 
revealing the home of God in the people, and 
the- society of the people in God. We cannot 
calculate the social development, or deduce the 
unseen from the seen. We dare not limit the 
power of the spirit to socialize ; or put boun- 



196 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

daries to the social development that may be 
accomplished by the forces now at work; or 
survey with our rude instruments and blurred 
sight the social way in which God may com- 
pel our steps. We see not yet how or what 
God may do, and the Judge of our civiliza- 
tion will do right beyond our unbelieving 
thought. But we should be getting ready 
for the social baptism of the Holy Spirit and 
fire. For the coming revelation of God will be 
our judgment in the righteousness of Christ, 
and the communion of our purified humanity in 
the Holy Ghost. Then the sons and daughters 
of God will change the glowing dreams of the 
prophets into enduring social facts. 



VI. 

THE APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO 
PROGRESS. 

Rom. VI. I, 2. 



If I supposed it to be very near, I should still try to put off the Golden 
Age, at least till I had reasoned my reader out of his fears of it ; for there is 
nothing that seems to alarm people so much as the notion of a Golden Age 
to come. Nothing is really so offensive to the average good man or 
woman as the notion of human brotherhood. But I think this is not from 
any innate hatred of one's kind, or a natural disposition to obey the law and 
the prophets rather than the new commandment they hang upon; for I am 
a great friend of human nature, and I like it all the better because it has had 
to suffer so much unjust reproach. It seems to me that we are always 
mistaking our conditions for our natures, and saying that human nature is 
greedy and mean and false and cruel, when only its conditions are so. We 
say you must change human nature if you wish to have human brotherhood ; 
but wc really mean that you must change human conditions, and this is 
quite feasible. It has always been better than its conditions, and ready for 
new and fitter conditions, although many sages have tried to rivet the old 
ones upon it, out of some such mistaken kindness as would forbid the crus- 
tacean a change of shell. The state of the crustacean after this change takes 
place is perilous, but with all its dangers it is not so perilous as the effort to 
keep its old shell on forever would be. — IV. S, Howells, in " Equality as 
the Basis of Good Society." 

The question is not whether monoply is to continue. The sun sets 
every night on a greater majority against it. We are face to face with the 
practical issue: Is it to go through ruin or reform? Can we forestall ruin 
by reform ? If we wait to be forced by events we shall be astounded to find 
how much more radical they are than our Utopias. Louis XVI. waited until 
1793, and gave his head and all his investitures to the people who in 1789 
asked only to sit at his feet and speak their mind. Unless we reform of 
our own free will, nature will reform us by force, as nature does. Our evil 
courses have already gone too far in producing misery, plagues, hatreds, 
national enervation. Already the leader is unable to lead, and has begun to 
drive with judges armed with bayonets and Gatling guns. History is the 
serial obituary of the men who thought they could drive men. — Henry D. 
Lloyd, in " Wealth Against Commonwealth." 

198 



VI. 

THE APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO 
PROGRESS. 

Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound ? God forbid. — 
Rom. vi. i, 2. 

The community of Christians at Rome seems 
to have been troubled with the old problem, 
still so new, of evil and moral redemption. 
To define the right in distinction from the 
wrong, and to procure the personal and na- 
tional practice of the right, the Jew had been 
trained in an ideal system of law, in some 
respects the most effective and just the world 
yet knows ; but he had sinned against the 
law, even to such a degree as to largely de- 
stroy the moral value of the law itself. The 
Greek, like other peoples of the world, had 
been without the Jew's law and knowledge 
of right ; but he, refusing to walk in the clear 
moral light of nature, had gayly sinned against 

199 



200 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

his own conscience, faithless to the right he 
truly knew. There was no difference between 
Jew and Greek as to moral guilt and need of 
redemption; no difference, when the light of 
each was taken into account, as to the depth 
of failure and the greatness of moral need. 
All had sinned and come short of that right- 
eousness which is the glory of God in human 
life. 

This raised the question of moral responsi- 
bility. How was he who knew he law, inter- 
pretative of God and right, better conditioned 
than he who knew not.^ The roots of individ- 
ual redemption reached so deep into the past 
and far into the future, with moral progress 
so involved in divine processes which the in- 
dividual had nothing to do with save accept 
them, that men were in danger of thinking 
sin a mere process of virtue, and of losing the 
sense of individual responsibility in the sense 
of human universality. In any case, it was 
clear that a man could not separate himself 
from the human organism, or consider his in- 
dividuality as a thing in itself, independent 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 201 

of the world processes ; he could treat him- 
self only as a part and function of the great 
whole. And the comprehension of this raised 
individual responsibility to the other extreme, 
seeming to increase it to the very responsi- 
bility of God, but with the same practical 
results that its loss produced ; when measured 
by its responsibility, individual effort was 
stricken with the sense of its insignificance. 

The question was enlarged beyond measure 
by the fact that the death of Jesus, with all 
its meanings and issues, was taken to be the 
highest expression of the love and thought of 
God for man. To the end of the redemptive 
economy, the cross would be at once the final 
interpreter of God and of the law of human 
life ; it was henceforth to be the symbol of 
progress and moral triumph. Sin had raised 
this cross, and nailed upon it the sacred 
victim. If sin had thus been, to Hebrew 
and other nations alike, the channel of 
God's richest grace, the medium of deliver- 
ance and moral freedom, why should man be 
condemned } If through sin had come man's 



202 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

greatest good, why not continue in sin that 
grace might abound ? 

In answer to the questions raised, the Ro- 
man letter is Paul's interpretation of history 
from the redemptive point of retrospect and 
prospect. It both anticipates and far tran- 
scends the historical philosophy of Hegel. 
Only incidentally theological, and that with 
no thought of a dogmatic system, it presents 
history as a continuous development toward 
human perfectness. With a mind as master- 
ful as his heart was loving, with an affection 
as pure as his faith was strong, with a uni- 
versal seizing hold of the meanings of things, 
the apostle's vision swept the whole range of 
human processes, and saw them all to be work- 
ing out the perfected life. The moral stature 
and freedom of Jesus was the divine account 
and perfect work of these processes, the judg- 
ment upon them that would never change. 
With lower than this destiny, the eternal word 
that dwelt and spoke in all flesh would let no 
man be satisfied. Towards its attainment all 
man's undying instincts were driving him, and 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 203 

all his divine impulses bearing him on. Even 
long after holy passions seemed to have died 
out of his fallen nature, the sin of man would 
be punishing him to renewed effort. 

With that sacred over-earnestness of his, 
so burning as to sometimes consume the ties 
that bound him to his brethren, Paul urged 
that sin had been working for right, in spite 
of itself. He saw its seeming triumphs ini- 
tiating the great movements of moral victory, 
and its bitter wages buying moral ransom 
from its hard service. No kind of disaster 
or disgrace had escaped bearing man nearer 
to the kingdom of redemption, in whose econ- 
omy of grace he was henceforth to believe 
and achieve. Without regard to its seeming 
makers, history of the worst sort had been 
helping man to his holy destiny. Pharoah as 
well as Moses, traders of Sodom as well as 
Abraham, Esau as well as Jacob, Greek as well 
as Jew, Pharisee as well as prophet, had 
been realizing God's great human thought. 
Whether sin had been necessity or loss, the 
sense of its guilt held the roots of the idea 



204 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

of redemption, and had made ground for that 
vision of God in Calvary which makes and 
exhausts new languages only to widen its 
meaning with the ages. 

But that progress had risen through moral 
failure was no sign that men could ever 
choose this method without the certainty of 
moral death to themselves, whatever God 
might buy with sin's wages. God forbid that 
any should continue in sin that grace might 
abound, for to continue in sin was just the 
way to impoverish grace. Man being now 
redeemed, sin was left without excuse. The 
sacrifice of Christ had brought it into the 
open, where it could be seen at its strong- 
est, in fatal contrast with the cross ; its 
strength a delusion, its triumph a defeat, and 
its reality a fiction. The sacrifice was also 
the definition of righteousness, so that there 
need be no more confusion as to its nature 
and value, no mistake as to its law of ser- 
vice and the reality of its power. This full 
disclosure of the nature of sin, together with 
the nature of righteousness, had finished the 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 205 

economy of sin, and initiated the economy of 
redemption. The redemptive initiative was 
not a letting-down, but a closing-up, of moral 
responsibility ; it spread before men a bound- 
less prospect of moral opportunity and adven- 
ture, with yet untrod continents of religious 
resource to be subdued to human uses. Men 
were no more in bondage to sin, and it had 
no more dominion over them. They were no 
longer citizens of the old economy, and were 
to reckon with righteousness henceforth, and 
with sin no more. The method and power 
of sin were forever broken ; and they were 
to deny it any right to be taken into account, 
much less regard it as necessary or powerful. 
The old order of things worked out and 
ended, and the new begun, they were to quit 
having faith in sin as a real force, and begin 
to put their whole faith in righteousness; 
they were to take to trusting the light that 
was in them, and cease believing in the dark- 
ness. The heart of the whole matter of evil 
lay in believing in it, in feeling helpless 
about it and making terms with it, in hav- 



206 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

ing more faith in its strength and reality 
than in the strength and reality of the good. 
By every sort of analysis and emphasis, Paul 
tried to make clear that religious safety and 
growth, moral prosperity and progress, de- 
pended not upon believing in wrong, but upon 
believing in right. Whatever the origin and 
mystery of sin, it was time to abolish it ; and 
the death on the cross was the abolition act. 
Now, I have no thought of using Paul to 
deny the fact of sin, nor the tragedy of it, 
in human development. There is little need 
of that, in these anxious days, with the hand 
of God heavy on the social conscience, and 
the question of what to do to be saved be- 
come a world interrogation. Never was the 
sense of sin so deep and universal, the knowl- 
edge of wrong so vivid and intense, the 
feeling of expiation so common — oppressive 
to some, exhilarating to others. The world's 
wretchedness seems about to become morally 
conscious of itself, and to make a stern and 
holy demand, which must be heard before 
long, that it be delivered from the body of 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 20/ 

its death. There are an increasing number 
to whom life is tolerable only on condition 
that it may be wholly contributed toward 
realizing in the common life that perfect good 
which is the fruit of right relations. '' Into 
a world sadly out of tune/' are these being 
born, as Mrs. Oliphant says of St. Francis, 
" to be a sign and wonder in the midst of all 
its self-seekings, its fightings, its traffickings, 
its dominion of the strong, and oppression of 
the poor." 

The last few years have wrought a swift 
and significant change in both scientific and 
popular attitudes toward the problem of evil 
and redemption. The story of Eden is no 
longer the joke it was taken to be, a little 
while ago, when evolutionary thought was 
young and exuberant, and many scientific dis- 
coveries were at hand. Adam and Eve never 
stood for so much moral meaning as now. 
The matchless narrative of the fall of man has 
been robbed of its sad beauty by the literal- 
ness of theologians and the stupid accuracy of 
scientists. It has been divested of its solem- 



208 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

nity by religious clownishness. Yet the story 
is not now hard to understand. Nor does 
it impress us as being funny. Its divine sim- 
plicity is the profoundest explanation of his- 
tory possible to the inspired imagination. It 
carries with it an infinite sadness, which only 
deepens as the course of man lengthens. The 
ages form no mist that can obscure its idea. 
It is the story of every human career that 
finds its way, through the wilderness of trial, 
from the Eden of innocence to the Calvary 
of moral freedom. It tells the experience of 
every man who has lived long enough in the 
flesh to learn the right and wrong of things. 
Nor would I deny that sin has been a 
method by which the highest good has come. 
How could it be else, if good came at all, 
with no other than sinful men through which 
to realize itself.^ No doubt Adam's fall was 
the beginning of wisdom and virtue ; that is, 
when man first awoke to moral consciousness, 
to the idea of a right in distinction from a 
wrong, then of course moral struggle and devel- 
opment began. This struggle has been the pro- 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 209 

gressive realization of God's human thought. 
God has not at any time been outwitted by- 
some stronger force. History is not a joy- 
less defeat. God is making the wrong carry 
along the right, and is binding man to the 
throne of life by bonds of death. The quick 
centuries and sad histories, with God and 
his universe of life, are toiling in man's be- 
half, increasing the promise of moral perfec- 
tion. Behind and within the failure and 
shame, the tragedy and violent effort, and 
through all the sin of the world, works the 
passion of God's love, with the eternal wis- 
dom of it, bringing to hope the strifeless 
progress, the holy society ; bringing to faith 
the law disclosed on Calvary as the final so- 
cial government. Within the disorders and 
perplexities, seeing eyes are discerning the 
not yet manifested unity, and hearing ears 
are catching the muffled harmony. 

But it does not follow that sin has been 
a necessity to the development of righteous- 
ness. The moral nerve of society has been 
fearfully enervated by a vague philosophy, 



2IO SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

pervading modern literature even unto the 
poetry of Browning, and somewhat inhering 
in evolutionary science, that sin is simply 
good in the making. While it is true that to 
the man who chooses the good and refuses 
the evil, sin becomes the very builder of his 
virtue, in no sense is sin good, or are we 
better for having sinned. That God has 
made it work redemptive good, does not 
change the fact that redemption brings no 
gift that might not have been a sinless gain. 
It was no more necessary for Adam than it 
was for Jesus to sin ; his character might 
have been proved as the character of Jesus 
was proved. Sin is not good in the making ; 
it can be nothing else, and nothing else 
ought it to be, than endless loss. Whatever 
we may think of it, sin is no constituent or 
elemental part of life, and was no necessity 
of moral creation. Sin does not lie in the 
nature of things human. 

Nor does it follow that the showing forth 
of God in Christ was dependent on sin, or 
that it would not have come in the due un- 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 2 1 1 

folding of God's thought for man. God did 
not act as other than himself in redeeming 
man ; he did not act exceptionally in the 
sacrifice of the cross. The cross did not 
reveal something God was circumstantially 
compelled to be or do, in order to repair a 
failure. God as truly sacrifices in creation 
as in redemption, for sacrifice is the law 
of creation. That sacrifice is the law of 
God's being and universe, is the meaning of 
the saying which we translate as the Lamb 
slain before the foundation of the world. It 
is because we found our ideas of sacrifice on 
sin instead of on righteousness that we get 
into pagan confusions about God and man, 
and form such rude and immoral doctrines of 
their relations. Sacrifice is not dependent 
upon sin, but upon the righteousness of love; 
sin is not its cause, but its hinderance and 
suffering. It was not the sufferings and 
death of Jesus that constituted his sacrifice, 
but the fruitful offering of his life, which 
sin and death antagonized. The substantial 
revelation of the cross was not made be- 



212 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

cause, but in spite of sin; sin did not bring, 
but long delayed, its coming. 

Sin is not something, but the want of some- 
thing, being nothing in itself. It is willing 
incompleteness, the negativing of growth, and 
hence the suicide of life; it becomes guilt, 
so that we speak of it as a positive and con- 
crete thing, when one refuses to will the right. 
Sin is a falling back from moral destiny, a 
failure to endure the holy, selfless struggle of 
service, which is the cost of being. God him- 
self would cease to be, were he to cease to 
become, to serve, and give himself. Our first 
parents ate of the fruit of moral ease ; they 
ceased to become, and their life fell, as our 
life falls, by the denial of life, instead of the 
denial of self ; and their fall, like ours, was the 
great fall from the pursuit of right into the pur- 
suit of happiness, from whence come the mise- 
ries of the ages, with every sort of tyranny and 
slavery. The sinfulness of sin is moral abiding 
in what one is, or in what society is. Continu- 
ance in an old organization of life, after a better 
has been revealed, is what makes sin sinful. 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 213 

We can thus see why Paul was so terrified 
at the bare possibility of the delusion that 
grace might abound through continuance in 
sin. Grace abounds to the degree that we 
are sin's enemy, and no more. The struggle 
against sin is itself the grace of God shining 
and working in our life. The disaster and 
guilt of sin are not in discovering that one 
has sinned, but in staying in sin through the 
dark imagination that it will overcome itself. 
The evil heart of unbelief that enters not 
in and fulfils the divine promises is the one 
that shamelessly waits for divine chance to 
add future moral glory to present moral sloth 
and cowardice. It is content with the historic 
gain and moral wealth inherited from the past, 
with the ethical principles and social practices 
through which the past reached the present, 
that sets redemption at naught, and changes 
the grace of God into the moral disgrace of 
man. 

Persistence in progress, with its unceasing 
change of effort and growth, is therefore the 
law and revelation of the Christian redemp- 



214 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

tion. What was good yesterday, or good in 
its method and application, may be so evil 
when applied to to-day, that to continue in it 
is death. ^* It is only a formal rectitude,'' says 
Hegel, ** deserted by the living Spirit and by 
God, which those who stand upon ancient 
right and order maintain." The sum of human 
duty is the moral obligation of the man, or 
the society, immediately to abandon a present 
organization of life the moment a possible 
better is conceived or discovered. And the 
better is always at hand. Perpetual transition, 
growth that rests only in increase, is the only 
rational state of society, the only moral condi- 
tion for man. Religion is continuous progress, 
through the moral adventure of faith in the 
ideal; while sin is the denial of the best pos- 
sibility one sees or knows, in favor of the 
worth and reality of the good one is or has. 
A progress that shall move on, to use a 
phrase of Goethe's, "without haste, but with- 
out rest, like the stars in heaven," is the 
ideal of social faith. When our ancestors 
quit their pestilent and unbelieving habit of 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 215 

trying to govern us, and are great enough to 
contribute their faith to the future without im- 
posing their will upon it, trusting God enough 
to set their children free in his hands, then 
progress will move on by fulfilment, and de- 
struction will be among the old things passed 
away. When a race of men is born that 
shall accept unceasing change and growth as 
the law of blessedness, and be reconciled to 
perpetual transition as the only living condi- 
tion, then the economy of redemption will 
have finished its work, and the kingdom of 
heaven will be fully come, with human life 
lived in the vision of God. 

The continuous human rise from subjection 
into freedom may be justly claimed as a 
revelation of science, by which the process 
or idea is called evolution. The term re- 
demption is not an altogether happy one, 
when the arbitrary meanings attached to it 
are considered. But the term evolution is no 
more satisfactory, when we take into account 
all the moral facts and forces of progress. 
So, until science and theology are each suffi- 



2l6 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

ciently delivered from the wisdom of their own 
conceits to hear each other's testimony, with 
a decent sense of having something to learn 
from each other, and are socialized enough 
to co-operate for the discovery of the one 
law and human meaning of development, we 
in religious spheres of effort had better stick 
to the old term of redemption. And, though 
I am no friend to dogmatic theology of any 
sort, I must here confess that, so far as I can 
see, theology is fairly ready to hear the con- 
clusions of science, while science regards 
religious contributions with dogmatic o^ de- 
risive contempt, when not with indifference 
or ignorance. But our systems of faith and 
our systems of science will not always remain 
apart, nor will they continue to be dogmatic ; 
they will each sometime become a social 
evangelism, a brother-discipleship in the one 
human school of God ; and all pursuits of 
knowledge, of whatsoever sort, will at last 
become one holy apostolate of social faith. 
In fact, the newer science, though using differ- 
ent terms, is already apostolic with the early 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 217 

Christian idea of a redeemed and perfected 
human life, — a life that has subdued the 
physical forces, to which it has hitherto been 
subjected, unto obedient and harmonious so- 
cial services. Without either science or the- 
ology meaning it, evolution and redemption 
are coming to be synonymous terms for one 
human revelation and destiny, one final strife- 
less progress. 

But that progress will be reached only 
through the widest and most daring applica- 
tion of the law by which Christ redeems. 
They who discern on Calvary the disclosure 
of a deeper, vaster law than the ways of men 
and nature we call laws, who read the cross 
as the law of the physical universe as well 
as of moral redemption, and who proceed 
to interpret that law in economic and civic 
terms, will save the world many dark ages, 
and prepare the way of the holy society. 

The failure of Christ's redemptive resources 
is not in any lack of their quantity or quality, 
but in the notion that they will work redemp- 
tion without being applied. The superstition 



2l8 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

that righteousness will increase without ad- 
venture and sacrifice, that *^ things will come 
out right somehow " without our making them 
right, is sin doing its worst. To believe 
that grace will abound without effort, or as 
its substitute, is the supreme delusion. To 
practise an economy of sin, while we live in 
an economy of redemption, is the supreme 
anarchy. To organize life by a law of selfish- 
ness, when we are under the government of 
the law of sacrifice, is the supreme foolish- 
ness. To go on recognizing evil as a fact to 
which we must be reconciled, to treat compe- 
tition as an economy we must make terms 
with, to regard the old self-interest as a law 
to which we must submit, to reckon with 
moral ignorance as the first thing to be ac- 
cepted in order to be practical, and all this 
in the face of the offered Christ, is the 
supreme atheism. Against this atheism the 
scientific revelation of love as natural law 
will not prevail, nor will the signs of change 
with which these anxious days of social strain 
are instinct and messianic ; only that absolute 



APPEAL OP REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 2I9 

judgment that shall not leave one faithless 
stone upon another will prevail against it for 
the redeemed progress. 

The guilt of this atheism is upon us all, 
and upon all our ways and works. By faith 
and practice, individually and collectively, reli- 
giously and politically, commercially and edu- 
cationally, we go on sinning that grace may 
abound. To the common thought, sin abounds 
much more than grace ; and therefore the com- 
mon thought reckons with sin, and makes grace 
of practically small account. In a profound 
sense, the most religious of us reckon with sin 
too much and with righteousness too little. 
When dealing with life, the most of us believe 
a great deal more in the devil than we believe 
in God. As John Ruskin said, we really think 
the laws of the devil more practicable than the 
laws of God, however much we deny our belief. 
We like to think so, for we thus evade the 
very responsibility the economy of redemption 
puts upon us. With our lips we confess that 
the kingdom and the power and the glory are 
God's ; with our lives we confess that they are 



220 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

Satan's. We undertake our enterprises, not 
alone of business or politics, but of religion 
and reform as well, by making terms with evil ; 
by reckoning with it as the real power. That 
terrible temptation typified by Jesus in the wil- 
derness — so forced upon us by the outer view 
of experience and history — to make conces- 
sions to evils honored by established order and 
ancient custom, in order to obtain a modicum 
of righteousness, still deceives and overcomes 
our ideals, as it did not deceive and disarm the 
one clear-visioned Son of man. Movements for 
holy national life surrendered to mere diplo- 
macy, the kingdom of heaven hid in ecclesias- 
tical politics and the prayings and preachings 
of costly temples, wide social impulses lost in 
compromises which the religious effect between 
them and the powerful in market and state, 
expectations of the toiling poor that perish in 
the philanthropies of rich buyers of legislation, 
municipal reforms committed to the moneyed 
respectability that has really looted and de- 
bauched the city, are all ways of sinning that 
grace may abound. These are our modern 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS, 221 

ways, fervently encouraged by all sorts of 
teachers, of continuing in injustice and covet- 
ousness, that justice and brotherly love may 
abound. At bottom, they are forms of the 
unconscious devil worship that rules society as 
official religion or as business, as the triumph 
of grace or as political economy, as wise man- 
agement or as clear thinking, as judicious 
effort or as common sense. They are all the 
persistence of the atheism that takes on a reli- 
gious fright when man would rise above money; 
that sees civilization exterminated by the doc- 
trine that life is more sacred than property ; 
that zealously denies the faith for to-day in the 
name of the faith of yesterday. 

The present condition of civilization is a 
universal instance of the anarchy of thought 
and effort that follows the persistence of the 
modes and experiences of yesterday over the 
newer life of to-day. Industrialism rose out 
of feudalism through conditions of competi- 
tion. The economist wrote down the observ- 
able phenomena of these competitive condi- 
tions as natural economic laws, to which be 



222 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

social dominion and power and glory forever. 
A deeper insight might have shown that indus- 
trial progress would arise in spite of competi- 
tion, rather than because of it, through various 
forms of modified or unconscious co-operation, 
by which competition was qualified or avoided. 
Competition will yet be defined, in relation 
to human development, as a past mode or 
condition, but not a law ; and a condition 
which human life instinctively finds the 
quickest way to escape. A better evolution- 
ary science will one day show us that co- 
operation, more than competition, has been 
the great law of survival in nature. Even 
if it had been as fierce as Mr. Darwin pic- 
tured, it did not follow that competition would 
keep on when life became human and ethi- 
cal. Quite the reverse might follow, as some 
of the ablest analysts of competition in nat- 
ural development now insist. "A real capa- 
city for change, and that for the better, an 
impulse of perfectibility,'' is that by which 
Hegel distinguishes man from ^'merely nat- 
ural objects, in which we find always one and 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 223 

the same stable character/' And if competi- 
tion really were the law of industrial de- 
velopment, it does not at all follow that it 
should be the law of the social organization 
of industry. 

At its human best, competition is always 
a moral evil, though under certain imagined 
conditions it appears to be moral gain and 
social vigor. It is profane in theory, when 
judged by the teachings of Jesus, or by the 
moral reason, and causes the worst instincts 
of life to triumph. It makes the average life 
an uncertain struggle for bread, and a de- 
grading game of chance. It brings the peo- 
ple into wretched economic subjection, with 
political, intellectual, and even religious sub- 
jection logically following. It involves the 
whole human organism in a strife corrupting 
from height to depth, cursing ideas and prac- 
tices alike, poisoning every motive, and 
perverting every action. 

But the social fact, more effectively than 
any social idealism, is denying the right of 
competition to persist, or to be called law. 



224 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

Competition is becoming impracticable. It 
will no longer work ; it is not working, save 
for both human and industrial death, with 
political and social anarchy. To all but the 
dogmatic economist, and those industrial fa- 
natics who have caught his trick of defining 
every thing socially oppressive and monstrous 
as natural law, it is clear that the competitive 
system has exhausted its possibilities for prog- 
ress, that it can only continue for social 
disaster and disintegration. Unless supplanted 
by a co-operative civilization, it may bring the 
universal woe so long foretold. ^^ It is not 
to be denied," confesses Mr. Herbert Spen- 
cer, in his argument against socialism, ''that 
the evils are great, and form a large set-off 
from the benefits. The system under which 
we at present live fosters dishonesty and 
lying. It prompts adulterations of countless 
kinds ; it is answerable for the cheap imita- 
tions which eventually in many cases thrust 
the genuine articles out of the market ; it 
leads to the use of short weights and false 
measures ; it introduces bribery, which viti- 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 22$ 

ates most trading relations, from those of the 
manufacturer and buyer down to those of the 
shopkeeper and servant ; it encourages decep- 
tion to such an extent that an assistant who 
cannot tell a falsehood with a good face is 
blamed ; and often it gives the conscientious 
trader the choice between adopting the mal- 
practices of his competitors, or greatly injur- 
ing his creditors by bankruptcy. Moreover, 
the extensive frauds, common throughout the 
commercial world and daily exposed in law- 
courts and newspapers, are largely due to 
the pressure under which competition places 
the higher industrial classes." ^ And Mr. 
Spencer calls all these " minor evils," com- 
pared to the unjust distribution which the 
system procures. 

It would surely seem that the appeal of 
the deeper social conscience against our com- 
petitive system would be the most welcome 
and authoritative voice ; that the thought of 
continuing in the system, with any expecta- 
tion of justice or social morality, would be 

1 " A Plea for Liberty," p. 4. 



226 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

regarded by good men as irrational and blas- 
phemous. In the light of the present social 
facts, it is well-nigh as immoral and absurd 
to talk about honorable competition as it 
would be to talk about honorable burglary. 
In the actual human situation in which we 
stand, our commercial, political, educational, 
and religious cant about peaceful rivalry, 
honorable competition, and the like, are as 
disgusting as the ''holy whine'' of any ema- 
ciated pietism ; and we all know we are 
hypocrites in the use of such phrases. Yet 
economists, monopolists, and clergymen would 
have us continue in competition, that social 
justice and religion, commercial integrity and 
individual enterprise, may abound ; that the 
poor, who possibly average a few cents more 
a day than they did some four or five hun- 
dred years ago, may prosper and be grateful. 
And by this stupendous weight of intellec- 
tual humbuggery and moral hypocrisy, sol- 
emnly posing as clear thinking and judicious 
effort, we the sons of God suffer social prog- 
ress to be overborne — till the day of reckon- 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 22/ 

ing. But need we wait for reckonings of 
fire, for suffering such as the world may 
have never known, to teach us obedience to 
the better ? As we behold the doctors of 
economics and the doctors of religion stand- 
ing in the midst of the social fact to bless 
it, with the high priests of business support- 
ing their right hand and political traffickers , 
their left, the irony of the situation should 
call us to sanity, and show us the imbecility 
of our unfaith, before the social woe rises 
into universal wrath. 

There are terrible perplexities, I know, 
breaking the purest hearts. However hard 
or devoutly our wills be set against it, so 
long as the system exists, we are all com- 
petitors in some degree. All of us who live 
in any measure of comfort live more or less 
by economic stealing, no matter what our 
occupation or intentions. Our comforts are 
bought with the poverty, and even the lives, 
of beaten men and women. It is practically 
true, and ought to be true, that none of us 
can extricate ourselves from the social dis- 



228 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

grace and pain until the whole social life 
is extricated. We cannot sleep, eat, wear 
clothes, travel, educate ourselves, read books, 
attend public worship, without participating 
in the social wrong and bearing the social 
guilt. 

But, withal, we need not continue in the 
sin of the system under the delusion that 
grace may thereby abound. There is a di- 
vine, as well as a devilish, complicity in evil. 
We may be in, while we are not of, organized 
wrong. We may war and sacrifice against 
the competition that besets us, participating 
in it only for its overthrow and the social 
rescue. We may confess our part in the 
social stealing, and partake of it only to ex- 
pose it for the social deliverance. We may 
help the prosperous to understand how the 
system makes them social thieves, in spite of 
themselves ; pious maybe, and honorable, but 
none the less thieves, to be brought to judg- 
ment with the system. We may go with 
them to the repentance of social sacrifice — 
the sacrifice that will take no more of the 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS, 229 

prosperity of the world until the kingdom of 
God be come. If we are in the system as 
men who will not tolerate it for a moment, 
nor make peace with it in a single attitude, 
but who will profit by it as little as possible, 
while seeking to be to it of the highest re- 
demptive utility, then we are ending the ex- 
isting order and preparing for the better one. 
Thus engaging in the social expiation, we 
may deny in the name of our Christ, by the 
power of his blood and living presence, by 
his redemption and kingship, that there is one 
wrong thing in our own life, or in the life of 
the world, that needs to continue unremedied 
for an hour ; we may affirm that grace will 
instantly abound in the smallest honest effort 
to right the wrong, making that effort a fruit 
and glory of the new earth. 

In that famous Leyden sermon of Pastor 
Robinson to the departing Pilgrims, reported 
twenty-six years later by Edward Winslow, 
in which he spoke his confidence that '' the 
Lord had more truth and light yet to break 
forth out of his holy word," he exhorted 



230 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

them to remember that it was "not possible 
the Christian world should come so lately 
out of such thick anti-Christian darkness, and 
that full perfection of knowledge should break 
forth at once/* "He took occasion also to 
bitterly bewail the state and condition of the 
Reformed Churches, which were come to a 
period in religion, and would go no further 
than the instruments of their Reformation,'' 
Luther and Calvin, "a misery much to be la- 
mented. For though they were precious shin- 
ing lights in their times, yet God hath not 
revealed his whole will to them ; and were 
they now living, saith he, they would be as 
ready and willing to embrace further light as 
that they had received."^ If we, who glorify 
by our words the past faith and mighty work 
of this Moses of the Pilgrims, would practise 
his religious statesmanship, and heed his warn- 
ing in our relation to present problems, we 
would then glorify Robinson and the Pilgrims 
in truth, with Jesus and his prophets and 
apostles as well, and save to the social move- 

1 " The Pilgrim Fathers of New England," Dr. John Brown, p. 189. 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 23 1 

ment the leadership of the religion from which 
noble leaders are turning bitterly away. Un- 
faith in the better is the essence of all athe- 
ism ; it bears the sad fruits of revolutions 
that destroy the present and revert to the 
past, ere able to gain strength for progress 
and make way for the better than the good 
that is. 

Our habits manifest this atheism because 
the curse of it is upon all our systems of 
thought. The long line of fatalistic philoso- 
phies, making man the tragic play of dual 
and jealous forces, still make for fear and 
bondage, still hold men back from freedom, 
and the manhood of the sons of God. The 
Asiatic fatalisms disputed by the great drama 
of ^schylus, the moral despair of the gnos- 
tics, the Augustinian price God paid to Satan 
for man, the irresponsible sovereignty en- 
throned by Calvin and at Westminster, the 
Spencerian unknowable and its unmoral ener- 
gies, the economic laws set forth by the econ- 
omists, are all modes of one and the same 
monstrous delusion that power is other and 



232 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

stronger than right. The old gnostic dualism 
has laboriously and firmly wrought its morbid 
scepticism into the theological redemption, 
that does not redeem ; into the theological 
atonement, that presents the greatest con- 
ceivable lie as the most saving religious 
truth ; into the theological righteousness, that 
practically confesses the devil to be the world's 
real lord. The self-interest and self-love of 
the moral sciences are the old sad unfaith in 
the all-goodness of the world forces, crystal- 
lized and made small by the puerilities of 
school culture. The mysterious fates of the 
east are the economic laws of the west. The 
Oriental faith in evil reincarnates itself in 
Augustine, to be restated in Christian terms 
and Roman forms ; the Augustinian faith is 
systematically restated by Calvin ; and the 
Spencerian philosophy is the Calvinistic theol- 
ogy restated in modern materialistic and sci- 
entific terms. These each have at heart the 
same desperate and baneful faith in the in- 
herent and irreconcilable antagonism between 
righteousness and the nature of things. They 



APPEAL OF REDEMPUION TO PROGRESS. 233 

are all, in some degree, the persistence of 
the ancient fear, with its dualistic faiths and 
fatalistic philosophies, that evil holds the hu- 
man situation, and must be propitiated if life 
is to be safely or prosperously lived. 

But lift up your eyes, and you may behold 
a new world forming in human faith, en- 
sphered in a new universe, and a new man 
rising from the struggle, the agony, the blood, 
the fear, and the dust. Prometheus is unbind- 
ing himself. Of the dominion of evil, of 
fates, of mysteries, of necessities, of unknow- 
able energies, of economic laws, we are to 
have an end ; these are the delusion, the lie — ■ 
the monsters of the night, ghosts that now 
vanish with the dawn. Man is greater than 
these, their anointed king, and king because 
trustful servant of all. The fates are to be 
of man's making, and the forces of nature his 
glad servants, the winds and the waves obey- 
ing him, while he pursues the highest, free 
from fear of the unknown, walking in the 
light, with faith to dare and to adventure 
in social quest and moral discovery. Man is 



234 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES. 

rising stronger than the superstition, alike 
theological and scientific, alike political and 
economic, that power is other than right, and 
that only self-interest can summon to the 
highest effort. This time, when the temple 
of power falls, Samson will stand, and will re- 
ceive his sight with his freedom. And upon 
the ruins of power he will build the temple 
of service, which is the temple of the re- 
deemed and glorified humanity, the abiding 
temple of God. The word of God is being 
made flesh universal, and we are beholding 
its glory in the divine resolve with which 
man is nerving himself for this social task. 
'* In these days,'' so William Morris makes 
John Ball say, " are ye building a house which 
shall not be overthrown, and the world shall 
not be too great or too little to hold it ; for 
indeed it shall be the world itself, set free 
from evil-doers for friends to dwell in." 
" Therefore,'* he concludes, *' there is nought 
that can undo us except our own selves and 
our hearkening to soft words from those who 
would slay us." So he cries to men '' to do 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS. 235 

great deeds or to repent them that they were 
ever born/' ^ 

O brothers, why dwell we in ancient fears 
of the dark, when the glory of the breaking 
light is waking to service and freedom ? We 
are not helpless, nor in bondage ; nor is there 
anything to fear, save the fear that would 
keep us from having faith and being free. It 
is always infinitely easier, if we only knew it, 
to realize the highest conceivable right than 
the relative or moderate right. The kingdom 
and the power and the glory are God's, and 
not the devil's. Evil is not a power and a 
reality, and has no right to be reckoned with, 
or to exact terms, or to receive tribute. God 
forbid that we should continue to be led into 
lies by the delusion that grace will abound in 
our sin. The world is redeemed, with sin no 
more in dominion over us, and the exhilaration 
and prophecy of a strifeless progress in the air. 
** It is time," cries a noble voice of the hour, 
** for men to escape from yesterday, and to gov- 
ern to-day by to-morrow and the day after." 

^ " A Dream of John Ball.'* 



236 SOCIAL MEANINGS OF EXPERIENCES, 

Prophecy is not mockery, but reason at its 
highest. The vision of the new earth, the 
righteous society, is the history of what is 
becoming ; no other assumption as the basis 
of thought and action is good sense. It is 
irrational to conceive of selfishness and strife 
as a permanent mode of activity. ^^ In the 
creation of a just God,'' says Charles Wagner, 
"evil cannot be more than a transitory state, 
the result of error and ignorance," to disap- 
pear through '^the efforts of men who live 
outside of themselves." The dream of moral 
wholeness, of a social life that is a holy com- 
munion and not a struggle and strife, is not 
a noble illusion. The long tragedy of effort 
will have its human perfectness at last. The 
creation shall be delivered from its bondage 
of corruption into the liberty of the glory of 
the sons of God. 

The seeds of human sacrifice will then grow 
into trees of life, and put forth their leaves 
for the healing of the nations. This winter 
of doubt and sorrow, this night of fear, these 
clouded and sometimes starless skies, this baf- 



APPEAL OF REDEMPTION TO PROGRESS, 237 

fling of effort, this sickness of hope, will then 
have gone. The social springtime will awake, 
never to sleep ; and the summer of God will 
come, and not fail with ripening life. The 
flowers of love will bloom in the warmth of 
a passion as pure as the breath of angels ; in 
a human life whose every impulse is social 
ecstasy, and every act a sacrament of service. 
And in the fulness of time, men will eat no 
more of the tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil, having entered the joy of the life 
that knows neither merit nor demerit. Then 
our human life will endlessly rise in a strife- 
less progress, and become the perfect music 
of God's great human thought. 



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